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 did. I got hired as a Unix admin around 2008 and inheriteted the care and feeding of an old Jabber server the ~3000 employee company was using for internal instant messaging. I near-immediately migrated it over to an OpenFire server. A few months later I learned the pitfalls of using the built-in database (it blows up on you when it gets big enough cuz back then it was all in-memory, not sure about how it works out of the box now). I remember figuring out how to manually migrate that over to mysql… and I skipped the ITSM change control process and just had it execute overnight via some at commands and scripts. Went smoothly and I didn’t get fired :P
I learned a bunch from that and set up an OpenFire server at home so I could chat from my dynamic dns hostname to some people on gchat.
And that’s about the extent of it. My internal company chat eventually got replaced with skype for business and then teams. My personal stuff eventually switched over to text messages and Signal (and discord and slack and mattermost and whatever else for all the odds and ends communities I keep in touch with).