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?
Back in the day, like many people then, I had a couple of different accounts across multiple messaging platforms. 2 domestic ones, couple of international ones. It was a fun mess but people were tired of running multiple apps and so loads of multi-protocol apps were developed.
Usually messaging protocols were simply reverse engineered and some apps also used plug-ins so that niche protocols could be added by community. Some also did gateways that translated proprietary protocols to XMPP.
By the end of that era many platforms opened themselves up with XMPP. It was nice because most of those multi-protocol apps didn’t have to support as many different platforms explicitly.
But that’s about it. I had a Google Talk account too and found it cute that I can use it to add my friends on other platforms. I was a nerdbut barely knew any other people that were utilizing it. Realistically it didn’t make any difference because you still had to use multi-protocol app for the ones that didn’t open.
Soon platforms that were never on or barely on XMPP started to take over. Messenger was the biggest in my country and it was always a PITA on third party apps.
Google Talk doing a rug pull on XMPP didn’t to anything meaningful to XMPP itself. It was never that big and simply remains a niche to this day.
I too get an impression that a single article on XMPP Gtalk drama made round on Fediverse that many made their opinion solely on it.
Similar to others, used it with Jabber, ncurses based clients and such. It was pretty darn great back in the day. It made me believe that Google wanted to do the right thing, even if it screwed up now and then… Ah more fool me on that one to be sure.
Interestingly enough, when Slack still supported IRC that is how I used it, ncurses based IRC client in the console. Then that was put out to pasture as well.
Sadly the only time I see XMPP these days is in the background transport for Chrome Remote Desktop. It’s still there, just not being used for “chat” messages.
I had a five digit ICQ account back in the day. Also used pidgin and MSN Messenger. A lot of us nerds used XMPP clients. Hell, ICQ had tens of millions of users at its peak.
I was very glad then Google adopted it and maybe that would mean that we could stop making a new instant messenger account every year, and deal with non-compliant plugins for that GNU client…
Just to see Google using it to do the exact opposite.
A lot of us thought that, in our innocence. We thought Google were the good guys for a while.
“But they were, all of them, deceived.”
