Oh no, how did we use it for decades and were even able to talk to Google Chat users.
Your comment is rude and misleading at best.
The thing you’re referring to was called Google Talk, introduced in 2005. XMPP was viable for the unguided public at that time mainly because Google Talk and Facebook Messenger were large public XMPP servers, with clients integrated as first class features in the world’s largest social networking sites, supplementing the small independent servers to form a healthy ecosystem. This allowed anyone to easily discover the network, sign up to use it, and be confident that they and their contacts would remain reachable for more than a few years.
Google Talk was replaced in 2013 by Google Hangouts, bringing an end to their XMPP support. Facebook Messenger added XMPP support in 2010 and ended it in 2015. Jabber.org, which was the only significant independent host (but still relatively small), stopped offering new accounts in 2013. The healthy ecosystem vanished over a decade ago.
Also, the rich feature set being discussed here includes modern end-to-end encryption (OTR doesn’t qualify), persistent message history with multi-device support, voice and video chat, and a variety of other things that were not supported by XMPP back then, if ever.
So no, you were not doing this with XMPP for decades.
You can get most of those features today if you have an XMPP server implementing a pile of specific XEPs on top of the base protocol, and if you and your contacts also use clients with the same extensions implemented just right. This might be great for a small group with a well-informed system admin, or for the tiny minority of people who might stumble into a service provider that makes it easy for them, but the vast majority of the unguided public are not going to navigate those waters successfully, and even those few who do will have no reasonable assurance that their accounts will last longer than summer vacation.
I miss Jabber’s heyday, too, but to believe it can make a comeback is just wishful thinking. It doesn’t have the support that would be required for that, and there’s no sign that it ever will. That’s why I don’t recommend it outside of small groups.
Sorry about that! I didn’t mean to offend you at all! The thing is, you’re spot on. So think of my comment as the rant of a bitter, nostalgic guy who lived through the days of XMPP, IRC, and all that, and saw what could be done. I just hold a bit of a grudge against the way instant messaging and chats are now. Everything’s locked into closed systems, it’s slowly turning rubbish, and decent solutions don’t catch on because they’re “too complicated”, ignoring all the good stuff we’d get if we managed to get past the first hurdle.
On the bright side: The general public (and some governments) are beginning to notice the importance of privacy and data sovereignty, more people are seeking out systems with distributed designs, and tools that address modern needs using those designs are slowly getting less complicated to use.
I hope we can keep our governments from criminalizing them.
Oh no, how did we use it for decades and were even able to talk to Google Chat users.
Your comment is rude and misleading at best.
The thing you’re referring to was called Google Talk, introduced in 2005. XMPP was viable for the unguided public at that time mainly because Google Talk and Facebook Messenger were large public XMPP servers, with clients integrated as first class features in the world’s largest social networking sites, supplementing the small independent servers to form a healthy ecosystem. This allowed anyone to easily discover the network, sign up to use it, and be confident that they and their contacts would remain reachable for more than a few years.
Google Talk was replaced in 2013 by Google Hangouts, bringing an end to their XMPP support. Facebook Messenger added XMPP support in 2010 and ended it in 2015. Jabber.org, which was the only significant independent host (but still relatively small), stopped offering new accounts in 2013. The healthy ecosystem vanished over a decade ago.
Also, the rich feature set being discussed here includes modern end-to-end encryption (OTR doesn’t qualify), persistent message history with multi-device support, voice and video chat, and a variety of other things that were not supported by XMPP back then, if ever.
So no, you were not doing this with XMPP for decades.
You can get most of those features today if you have an XMPP server implementing a pile of specific XEPs on top of the base protocol, and if you and your contacts also use clients with the same extensions implemented just right. This might be great for a small group with a well-informed system admin, or for the tiny minority of people who might stumble into a service provider that makes it easy for them, but the vast majority of the unguided public are not going to navigate those waters successfully, and even those few who do will have no reasonable assurance that their accounts will last longer than summer vacation.
I miss Jabber’s heyday, too, but to believe it can make a comeback is just wishful thinking. It doesn’t have the support that would be required for that, and there’s no sign that it ever will. That’s why I don’t recommend it outside of small groups.
Sorry about that! I didn’t mean to offend you at all! The thing is, you’re spot on. So think of my comment as the rant of a bitter, nostalgic guy who lived through the days of XMPP, IRC, and all that, and saw what could be done. I just hold a bit of a grudge against the way instant messaging and chats are now. Everything’s locked into closed systems, it’s slowly turning rubbish, and decent solutions don’t catch on because they’re “too complicated”, ignoring all the good stuff we’d get if we managed to get past the first hurdle.
I think we just found our common ground. :)
On the bright side: The general public (and some governments) are beginning to notice the importance of privacy and data sovereignty, more people are seeking out systems with distributed designs, and tools that address modern needs using those designs are slowly getting less complicated to use.
I hope we can keep our governments from criminalizing them.