How many people here have actually used XMPP?

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_need_a_vacation,
@i_need_a_vacation@kbin.social avatar

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.

allywilson,

Used to use OpenFire / Spark at work for years, so was aware of the protocol.

notavote,

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 ( 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.

Silviecat44,

I haven’t so I don’t really relate to the panicking people

Nougat,

We used XMPP for chat (OpenFire) at my work for a while. I used to use it in one of those multi-protocol chat clients (it was Trillian, if I recall).

SCmSTR,

Trillian was the shit! I always wondered if they stole my information or it was a virus, but the combining all the stupid services into one with an the quality of life improvements was fantastic!

You remember their little multicolored round glass minimize, maximize, close buttons? It was like yellow, blue, red iirc?

It was eye opening and made me realize how nice things COULD be.

beto,
@beto@lemmy.studio avatar

I used it, I actually ran my own server under my domain. It was nice to be able to talk to people using Gchat from my account.

MargotRobbie,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

Did you switch to using Gchat as your XMPP client then?

beto,
@beto@lemmy.studio avatar

I think so! I think at some point all my friends switched to WhatsApp and Messenger.

Airgoof,

I used it. Even at some point I wrote simple web client for it.

oct2pus,
@oct2pus@kbin.social avatar

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.

topnomi,
@topnomi@kbin.social avatar

I used xmpp pretty extensively right before google started using it. The future was bright. Then Google connected to it and shit started getting weird. Only some features would work with Google talk, or would work inconsistently. But Google talk -> Google talk always worked. So lots of people started using it exclusively. Then it seemed to fragment into different ecosystems.

kat,
@kat@feddit.de avatar

I used Jabber + Pidgin + OTR plugin for quite a while, also hosted my own Prosody server. But I never perceived it as a mainstream thing. Most people I knew used ICQ.

CarbonatedPastaSauce,

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.

marcos,

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.

CarbonatedPastaSauce,

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.”

count0,
@count0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I “tried” to use XMPP/Jabber in its heyday, but in my experience (& memory) it never got to the point to have a “critical mass” of community (I felt to be part of / want to be part of).

Fediverse/Lemmy has this critical mass at least since some weeks now - unless too many of those users decide to leave for another place, I’m happy here no matter what other things get hyped in a given week.

Back in Jabber’s day, I would have liked to see it develop some communities as they did - and still do! - exist on IRC, but that simply never happened (with one I would both be interested in and could find).

swope,
@swope@kbin.social avatar

I knew XMPP as Jabber, and I remember being delighted when I tested messages between my Jabber accounts and my Gmail account.

nydas,
@nydas@lemmy.world avatar

Does that translate to ‘it will be nice to chat with people using Threads from my Mastodon account?’

swope,
@swope@kbin.social avatar

I think it's a different thing. For me, my expectation is that Threads/Meta connecting to Fediverse is more like when AOL connected to IRC (specifically EFnet) in the 90s. I wasn't really into Usenet, but Eternal September was pretty much the same wave. AOL pushed hard in advertising and recruiting users, and IRC and Usenet were originally populated with people who got into it more organically.

I don't remember Jabber or XMPP having any kind of discovery system. I only ever talked to people who knew already. So when Google connected Talk, it was just added convenience. I wasn't bombarded with rude idiots like the AOL invasion of IRC. When Google ended XMPP support, I was disappointed, but I continued using XMPP with my friends.

I think Meta is spending a ton on promoting Threads, and it's going to bring in a lot of people with different values. It's going to be unpleasant for me, but I think that's just the self-similar fractal that is the Internet.

Ender2k,
@Ender2k@kbin.social avatar

@swope

@MargotRobbie

Recently pulled an old iMac out of storage and logged in. iMessages started trying to log into all my Jabber accounts…

nakal,
@nakal@kbin.social avatar

Me too. I stopped using XMPP/Jabber when I found Matrix.

dudeami0,
@dudeami0@lemmy.dudeami.win avatar

Google tried to add support for it in their product

Is like saying that google tried to add support for HTTP to their products. Google Talk was initially a XMPP chat server hosted at talk.google.com, source here.

Anyone that used Google Talk (me included) used XMPP, if they knew it or not.

Besides this, it’s only a story of how an eager corporation adopting a protocol and selling how they support that protocol, only to abandon it because corporate interests got in the way (as they always do). It doesn’t have to be malicious to be effective in fragmenting a community, because the immense power those corporations wield to steer users in a direction they want once they abandon the product exists.

That being said, if Google Talk wasn’t popular why did they try to axe the product based on XMPP and replace it with something proprietary (aka Hangouts)? If chat wasn’t popular among their users, this wouldn’t of been needed. This could of been for internal reasons, it could of been to fragment the user base knowing they had the most users and would force convergence, we really can’t be sure. The only thing we can be sure of is we shouldn’t trust corporations to have the best interest of their users, they only have the best interest of their shareholders in the end.

MargotRobbie,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

Hmm. Did not know that. Thanks!

But my counterpoint to the axing bit is that Google did not need any reason to do anything dumb with their Chat products, otherwise Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger would not have been as popular as they are now.

MargotRobbie,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

Also, in my defense, that article was just wrong about XMPP’s history then, as it stated that:

In 2006, Google talk became XMPP compatible. Google was seriously considering XMPP.

Which is why I thought it was a feature they later added.

OneCardboardBox, (edited )

This could of been for internal reasons, it could of been to fragment the user base knowing they had the most users and would force convergence, we really can’t be sure.

Given the well documented history of Google making absolutely dogshit product decisions, I think it’s the former. In fact, I don’t even need to think. Google already explained their reasoning. They had several different communication products (including Talk) that couldn’t be integrated together. They wanted the services to work seamlessly to try and compete with Messenger.

If chat wasn’t popular among their users, this wouldn’t of been needed.

Sure, chat was probably popular. However, I bet that 99% of their chat users never cared about XMPP compatibility in the first place. When you’re a product manager at a billion dollar megacorp who’s aiming for a promotion and you have a choice between making 1% of your users sad and massively simplifying the complexity of your new project… you pick the 99%

dudeami0,
@dudeami0@lemmy.dudeami.win avatar

As for the article, I think this is generally PR and corporate speak. Whatever their reasons were, they apparently didn’t shut down the initial XMPP servers until 2022 so it was a reliable technology. There “simplification” was bringing users into their ecosystem to more easily monetize their behaviour. This goes along with your last paragraph, at the end of the day the corporation is a for-profit organization. We can’t trust a for-profit organization to have the best of intentions, some manager is aiming to meet a metric that gets them their bonus. Is this what we really want dictating the services we use day to day?

OneCardboardBox,

they apparently didn’t shut down the initial XMPP servers until 2022

Sure. They probably had one client who paid them a pile of money every year to keep it live. If there was some plan to extinguish XMPP, surely they wouldn’t have kept it around for so long.

We can’t trust a for-profit organization to have the best of intentions

Sure. The solution is simple: don’t use corporate platforms. The way to prevent what happened was not for XMPP to block Google. It was for people to not switch to Google in the first place. Google Talk released in 2005. This was absolutely back when everyone still believed “Don’t be evil”.

UnhappyCamper,
@UnhappyCamper@kbin.social avatar

I had never heard of it either and I've been online since the 90s.

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