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 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.
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.
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%
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?
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”.
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.
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.
Still using XMPP to this day and my current client is Gajim. Discord is still “better” overall than it. If XMPP could cleanly and neatly intergate voice chat (like Mumble) and support images and things smoothly then it would be great, but it does not. This is a big part of the reason “nobody” uses it beyond what happen with Google/Facebook.
Google was quite ‘involved’ in adding voice chat integration to XMPP. They seemed to be pushing their solution as an ‘industry standard’ (which would be great), but they have never even provided proper specification and were breaking things that were already agreed on. This actually slowed down the process and ended with a few unofficial incompatible extensions for voice chats.
Also the very foundation of XMPP protocol (‘XML streams’) was quite unfortunate choice making implementations difficult and inefficient. I know that, because I have implemented three different client implementations, each time fighting XML parsers to do what XMPP expects (which is not what XML was designed for). And each extension to the protocol made things more complicated and more verbose, which didn’t made adding features like voice chat any easier.
You’re not getting an objective answer to the “did most of the Gtalk/Facebook messenger users even know they were using xmpp, or care?” from lemmy/kbin/fediverse users in 2023, as most here likely do care a wee bit more of the technical and privacy matters than the average joe.
However, I used XMPP personally via integrating it to my irc (weechat+bitlbee) so I could get all the IM services under one interface. I’m doing the same now with Matrix: I have irc, whatsapp, my smart home messages etc all forwarded to matrix.
We also built XMPP chat at our company which I was working for back in the day. I think it was called Jabber back then. Biggest drawback in my opinion was the lack of encryption out of the box - encryption should’ve been more integrated to XMPP from the get go, instead of being an extension.
XMPP/Jabber is once again a thing that could’ve been great for everyone. We could have one singular decentralized technology to IM which would’ve been open to all and interoperable. If approx 20% of the world’s population has a google account and 35% facebook account, at least every third person in the world would’ve been reachable via XMPP. And if it would’ve reached critical mass, it would’ve likely been even bigger.
I know I’m not getting the perspective of the average consumer (which is also why this is the perfect audience for the “Barbie” promotion), part of me is just curious about the perspective of enthusiasts on XMPP, since I know very little about it.
And also, most of the people who will want to reply to this post will have used xmpp and want to tel their story
How do you forward Whatsapp to matrix? Is it two-way?
https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp
Yeah, I’ve not touched whatsapp in years
I used it with Facebook Messenger to exchange OTR encrypted messages with one of my Facebook friends.
I used it.
I use movim, good client, web based and supports encryption, and about google topic, I expect from them only profit driven initiatives, not technical development for communities.
I used it. I was disappointed when Google removed support but only because it disrupted my user experience.
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.
Did you switch to using Gchat as your XMPP client then?
I think so! I think at some point all my friends switched to WhatsApp and Messenger.
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.
I might have almost destroyed a monitor with bad XFree86 timings on Slackware once or twice. Pulled the plug on that thing pretty fast.
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
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.
I used XMPP for years, then my work switched to using it, then my work switched to Slack.
XMPP was fine.
I knew XMPP as Jabber, and I remember being delighted when I tested messages between my Jabber accounts and my Gmail account.
Me too. I stopped using XMPP/Jabber when I found Matrix.
Does that translate to ‘it will be nice to chat with people using Threads from my Mastodon account?’
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.
Recently pulled an old iMac out of storage and logged in. iMessages started trying to log into all my Jabber accounts…
I LOVE XMPP!
I’m still upset that it didn’t take off like email did. It is/was the best federated instant messaging platform ever.
However with things like discord and to a lesser extent matrix, I don’t see it ever making a comeback and being widely used. I think google dropping it and going full hangouts was the final nail in its coffin 😞
XMPP is far superior to matrix for one on one and group messaging, imo. Matrix is useful for communities, as you said, like discord is.
Not with that attitude! Get a server set up ! :P
Lol yeah, but why do that when https://conversations.im/ is doing an amazing job of making great software and running an amazing service? Plus with super easy and simple E2E it’s pretty damn secure and private!
Lol I did a double take when I saw a us bank account and routing number provided for donations :P
Looks legit to me!!
Yeah, They offer XMPP hosting and other services. Having a bank account setup to collect donations and what would make it easier for B2B transactions.
Given all the scams and stuff these days I can see where that would raise some concerns though.
I’ve been using them for nearly a decade. I think they’re one of the only places around that host XMPP like that too.
F
I still run my own xmpp server!
But I’m the only one who has an account on it :/
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.
