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?
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.