With all the current discussion about the threat that Instagram Threads has on the Fediverse and that article about how Google Embrace Extend Extinguished XMPP, I was left very confused, since that was the first time I’ve heard that Gchat supported XMPP or what XMPP actually is, and I’ve had my personal Gmail since beta (no, don’t ask for it), and before then, everybody was using AOL/MSN Messenger to talk with each other online. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a single person who started using Gchat as an XMPP client.
Instead of a plot where Google took over XMPP userbase via EEE, it just seem to me more like XMPP was a niche protocol that very few hardcore enthusiasts used, and then Google tried to add support for it in their product, but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the development effort to support a feature that very few of their users actually used and abandoned it in typical Google fashion.
So, to prove my point, how many people have used XMPP here, and how many people here haven’t?
I still use it almost daily. Mostly for work. Sometimes I need to exchanhe sensitive information with my colleague, so I set up an xmpp server for us. It’s not federated with the rest of the network, and we use omemo for E2E encryption. Not every client supports it, and even those that do, suck in terms of UX. But, we consider it to be reasonably secure for our purposes.
As for my personal account, I’m logged in, but can’t remember the last time I used it.