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.
This is basically my recollection, too (I had honestly started to doubt my memory during the last couple of days).
Barely anyone was using Gtalk in the first place, so Google shutting it down was maybe a disappointment but had little effect on the wider messenger ecosystem.