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No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world
Margot Robbie @lemmy.world

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?

143 comments

  • I was quite involved in XMPP, not from the very start, but quite early. At first its biggest strength were 'transports' – gateways to other, proprietary, instant messengers. Having a Jabber (that what it was called there) account allowed one to talk to ICQ and AIM users. This is what pulled first users and allowed the network to grow. The protocol being open and network being federated appealed to various nerds, for whom it became the IM network of choice. Especially when they could use it to talk to friends and family on other networks.

    I wrote a Jabber transport for the most popular instant messaging platform in my country. It become a 'must have' component of any Jabber/XMPP server here. And some major local commercial internet services would start their own XMPP services – finally they had some means to compete with the monopolist. For me it was my '5 minutes of pride' – my little piece of open source software would be used by thousands of users, though most unaware of that. I have also wrote a Python library and a text client for XMPP.

    Then Google joined and Facebook started considering it. It seemed like XMPP will become 'the SMTP of instant messaging' – the real standard which will end closed proprietary communicators. But things didn't go well. Google would often ignore the agreed protocol, change it a bit, while still declaring full support. XMPP development would slow down, as everybody wanted the protocol to be agreed with Google, but Google just made some small improvements on their side without sharing details or participating in building XMPP specifications.

    Federation with Google would become more and more unreliable. Sometimes it would work, sometimes not. Google Talk, GMail Chat, Hangouts seemed to be the same thing and not the same thing at the same time it was a mess. Then Google pulled the plug. Then every smaller commercial providers did the same – there was no point in keeping the service when more than half of the contacts disappeared.

    I felt betrayed by Google (it really felt like a 'non-evil' corporation back then). But that was not what killed XMPP for me.

    I would have less and less people to talk to via XMPP, not just because of Google. Other networks my Jabber server was linked to become more and more irrelevant (anybody using ICQ, AIM or GG now?). Nerds that used XMPP left it because of loosing contacts in other networks, or just moved on to Discord (yeah… nobody seems to notice it is proprietary too). I would still use XMPP for family communication, but there was the spam…

    Oh… the spam. I would get over hundred of messages (or contact requests), mostly in Russian, offering me bitcoins or cracked software. They would come from many different accounts and domains. Often from 'legitimate' XMPP servers. And there were no means to reliably block it. The XMPP protocol had no proper means to handle illegitimate traffic. XMPP servers and clients had little spam-fighting measures. The spam made XMPP unusable for me, so I shut down my server too. I guess that could also be a major reasons for some commercial services to de-federate. I think USENET was killed by spam and no effective moderation too back in the day.

    Then my wife convinced me to bring it back. XMPP is again and still my primary communication platform for family chat. A private server with four accounts. Practically blocked from outside. We use it because it proven to be the most reliable thing and independent from the big corporations. Even Signal was inferior to that (no proper desktop/web clients, sometimes messages would be delayed even by hours, then it even stopped being convenient when they dropped SMS support).

  • 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?

    • 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.

  • 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.

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

    • @swope

      @MargotRobbie

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

    • 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.

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

  • The first time I ever heard my wife's voice was on XMPP (GTalk, I know, but I was using Jabber prior to). So yes, I absolutely used XMPP and watched it get obliterated.

  • I used pidgin back in the late 00s. Had to sign up with Jabber/XMPP to round out all the account options! Then it became my main way of talking with people who used gchat for years. Will admit it was never as popular as IAM/MSN was before or Skype was after

  • XMPP was sitting there in the background like any well behaved protocol. Anyone who used the original iChat or Google Talk, for example, used XMPP. And of course anyone who used Jabber.

    For that matter, iChat communicated with AIM via XMPP IIRC. It’s not something you actively attempted to use, just like people don’t tend to talk about using HTTP or SMTP.

    But when Google moved to a proprietary standard, that was the major client for XMPP. It broke my integration allowing me to communicate with all the other messaging systems, and the result was really that I stopped using all of them and switched to e2ee systems only, and Skype when I needed to.

    But I still use Pidgin to connect to a private XMPP server from time to time; I just don’t leave it running 24/7 anymore. I’ve got iMessages and Signal and Matrix for that.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • It's still around. I'm using it right now, in fact. Makes for a pretty damn good phone service as well, in conjunction with JMP

    • I’m currently using it via Pidgin as well :)

      Back in the day, I had an XMPP gateway running to combine my AIM, ICQ, Y! Messenger, iChat and MSN Messenger accounts into one place I could grab with the Jabber client of my choice. Eventually I used Google Talk as that client. Then they all went away.

  • I still use it almost daily. Mostly for work. Sometimes I need to exchanhe sensitive information with my colleague, so I set up an xmpp server for us. It's not federated with the rest of the network, and we use omemo for E2E encryption. Not every client supports it, and even those that do, suck in terms of UX. But, we consider it to be reasonably secure for our purposes.

    As for my personal account, I'm logged in, but can't remember the last time I used it.

  • I used it. I don't remember if my first jabber account was on Google or not, but I used the pidgin IM client to communicate with friends on ICQ, Gchat, AOL, and IRC. Then when Google removed jabber support I couldn't use my pidgin to connect to my Gchat anymore.

  • I run an ejabbered instance. It's one of my many federated services. Ironically, I added it when I heard Google was going to graveyard hangouts, which was the descendent of talk.

  • I've got my own XMPP server running on a raspberry pi so that I can have a safe chat app with my kids. I didn't want to expose them to the wider world at their age, but it's great to have a chat / video calling app that's all routed through my private kit. So now when they're ignoring my messages I know that they 100% safe online 🤣

  • I used it during Google's embrace via Talk. I work as a web dev and it was awesome to have a chat protocol on my desktops and phones which just worked on any platform, just download the XMPP app and sign in. SMS bridging also allowed me to keep my phone in my pocket for simple messages. I saw outside the walled garden concept, and it was wonderful. It felt like the future, but Google killed it. I have never forgiven them.

  • I host a server for my friends.

    Though, I think the most important part abt eee is the intervention of dev process. Or you can say google is supporting it but very much not being supportive.

  • I don't even know what XMPP is. It sounds like a media player from the early 2000's. I keep seeing it talked about here on Lemmy tho.

    • That was a great little mp3 app. It worked better on a low-resource, low-memory system than all the competition at the time (late 1990s). This is instead referring to the chat protocol that Google Talk ran on. It was formerly called Jabber.

  • 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 just launched a Snickket server yesterday. Currently just for my household. Was previously using signal and hadn't heard much about xmpp.

  • 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).

  • 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.

  • I used it. Had a few accounts on different servers, used XMPP between Facebook and Gmail, and ended with my own server but all of that is gone.

  • I’ve worked at many large companies that used this as their IM protocol.

  • I run a small server for my family on a cheap VPS. We've been using it for about 5 years now and it's chugging along. It's simpler and lighter than Matrix (at least from the server's point of view) but the user facing side could use some polish. It's perfectly fine for one to one chat. I wish it was more popular for group chatting.

    Here's a list of good servers if you want to try it out. You will also need a client. Check one with E2E suppo ort (called OMEMO in XMPP).

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

143 comments