No Stupid Questions

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.

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).

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 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.

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 😞

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

I used Jabber with the Pidgin client, my impression was also it was mostly developers and open source enthusiasts. Most people I knew who were not of those circles used commercial things like ICQ, MSN Messenger, AIM, etc. Frequently Jabber/XMPP enthusiasts had to use clients that supported it as well as some form of gateway to the other clients. Trillian was a popular multi-protocol client.

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

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.

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.

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 a lot, not through Google's gchat stuff, I ran my own XMPP server. It worked really well, I used the OTR encryption plugin in pidgeon. My work also used to use xmpp for internal chat within the company, however they switched to matrix like 5-6 years ago. Something I've since done personally too.

I like XMPP a lot, it worked well, including it being federated.

I used XMPP for years, then my work switched to using it, then my work switched to Slack.

XMPP was fine.

I used it but adoption was poor and interoperability felt poor, went back to IRC until matrix and signal came along

I did like 15 years ago. Now everyone wants to use discord. It wasn't up to me. Social factors are a bitch

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 ( https://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.

Similar to others, used it with Jabber, ncurses based clients and such. It was pretty darn great back in the day. It made me believe that Google wanted to do the right thing, even if it screwed up now and then... Ah more fool me on that one to be sure.

Interestingly enough, when Slack still supported IRC that is how I used it, ncurses based IRC client in the console. Then that was put out to pasture as well.

Sadly the only time I see XMPP these days is in the background transport for Chrome Remote Desktop. It's still there, just not being used for "chat" messages.

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

I used it.

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 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 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.

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.

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 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.

When I managed to connect my Pidgin to all networks some-years-ago it was amazing. Everyone thought I was a wizard.

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

I used it with Facebook Messenger to exchange OTR encrypted messages with one of my Facebook friends.

I used it. I was disappointed when Google removed support but only because it disrupted my user experience.

I use it every day.

I used it in the very early days with a Unix client. That's must've been in the late nineties...

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.

Probably more people, then you think. WhatsApp is xmpp based (just made incompatible at some point). Also the chat Nintendo uses on their gaming consoles. Xmpp is a solid mature protocol that's very lightweight. I use it every day running my own server to chat with my wife and daughter. Calls/ videocalls work brilliantly as well. I am a big fan.

I think Xfire and Raptr utilized XMPP.