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 run a small server for my family on a cheap VPS. We’ve been using it for about 5 years now and it’s chugging along. It’s simpler and lighter than Matrix (at least from the server’s point of view) but the user facing side could use some polish. It’s perfectly fine for one to one chat. I wish it was more popular for group chatting.
Here’s a list of good servers if you want to try it out. You will also need a client. Check one with E2E suppo ort (called OMEMO in XMPP).
I used xmpp, and also Gtalk, both of them. Talking both between xmpp clients and Gtalk users.
XMPP was a mess. Messages often didn’t arrive if target was on a different server. And different clients had different encryption and encoding standards, so even if it arrived it wasn’t always readable (or just completely ignored by the client). Images seldom worked across different clients.
The only way to make it work reliable was if everyone was on the same server with the same client with the same client version. That is, if the server itself hadn’t crashed.
The reason Google stopped the link was because while it had very little of legit messages on the platform, it had most of the spam and trolling. XMPP servers were the “soft underbelly” of Google talk, with the small server admins not having the resources to deal with bad actors even remotely as good as Google.
I still run my own xmpp server!
But I’m the only one who has an account on it :/
I used it back in the day before I could figure out how to use a mail server. I had shell scripts send me messages that way. I thought it was the coolest thing that I could receive instant messages while offline.
I used it so my IRC client would bridge to Google Talk via Bitlbee. It was super nice.
I basically use it for talking to one person fairly consistently, but I like having it as a backup when discord is down because it lets me keep contact with some of my tabletop group and also a few friends on my mastodon server.
I used it. Even at some point I wrote simple web client for it.
I used it. Had a few accounts on different servers, used XMPP between Facebook and Gmail, and ended with my own server but all of that is gone.
I’ve got my own XMPP server running on a raspberry pi so that I can have a safe chat app with my kids. I didn’t want to expose them to the wider world at their age, but it’s great to have a chat / video calling app that’s all routed through my private kit. So now when they’re ignoring my messages I know that they 100% safe online 🤣
I used it in the very early days with a Unix client. That’s must’ve been in the late nineties…
Unix in the 90s must have been hardcore.
VI as text editor…
X windows as GUI… Rest was terminal
GUIs are for chumps 😂 I watch all my YouTube videos as code in a terminal like the green text in the Matrix
I might have almost destroyed a monitor with bad XFree86 timings on Slackware once or twice. Pulled the plug on that thing pretty fast.
VAX.
(pun for “facts”)
I’m pretty sure I used one that was terminal based, likely using ncurses. Without searching, I can’t recall the name of it, though.
I used XMPP a bit among friends, more so when Google supported it, which was probably after ICQ/AIM/MSN wasn’t as popular? I don’t really talk to many people anymore, so whatever, heheh :)
It would be nice to see XMPP make some kind of “comeback” … or some sort of popularity boost like mastodon/lemmy/etc in recent times.
XMPP akka Jabber was the chat back in the day, if you wanted to chat one on one, and didn’t want msn and other random corporate messangers - jabber was it.
All geeky/techy friends were on jabber, others were on skype and some other networks through time.
That’s why Pidgin ( https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=) was important it implemented all those messaging protocols together.
But one year, all of a sudden, everyone got on jabber! Thise from Facebook and those from Google. Google Talk was great, all my friends were online and reachable. Good days.
Than they killed it. And it all stopped. Not only for us on jabber, but for everyone. But jabber god destroyed, no one was there anymore. We all felt that emptiness and it was not fun anymore.
Wether they did it intentionally or by accident doesn’t matter. If you go with your truck over kids bike intentionally to destroy it or just want to pass - doesn’t matter at the end.
Used to use OpenFire / Spark at work for years, so was aware of the protocol.
I used Jabber with some people I knew from a tech forum and it was actually nice, plenty of clients to choose too.
The thing is, I couldn’t get any of my actual friends to join, they were all over IRC / MSN and some of them still on ICQ, so I didn’t last that much.
XMPP was better known as Jabber back in the day, and most of us used Pidgin to connect to it. I used it for about 10 years or so.
The first time I ever heard my wife’s voice was on XMPP (GTalk, I know, but I was using Jabber prior to). So yes, I absolutely used XMPP and watched it get obliterated.
