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?

  • McMillan@lemmy.fmhy.ml
    61·
    1 year ago

    I used it in the very early days with a Unix client. That’s must’ve been in the late nineties…

    • kethali@lemmy.ca
      4·
      1 year ago

      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.