I've been running my own XMPP server for years, with federation enabled. A few years ago, it seemed like the logical successor to AIM and MSN and all those other walled garden IM systems. And how easy! My XMPP "name" was the same as my email address. One less thing to put on my business card.
But since then, I have realised a big problem with it - no-one uses it! Today I communicate with the world by iMessage, SMS, Twitter, and email. "Instant messaging" just seems to have died as a concept entirely, replaced by yet more walled gardens like Snapchat.
My XMPP server is being turned off for good, next week.
I've also been running my own federated XMPP server for a few years. To my dismay I discovered about a month ago, that a Gmail user on the "new Hangouts UI" never saw me as online. I could send them messages but they just got dumped into an "email"-looking message within Gmail, which I don't think even registered as unread. You'd have to go looking to find it at all. I think they could send me messages, but why would they if I never appear to be online? If the Gmail user reverted to the "old chat", things seemed to work as expected. They're nice enough to let you toggle between them for now, but my friend said only the new interface allows free SMSing or something.
Don't take my word too heavily, as this was just what I saw in a quick test with one Gmail account of my own. But I decided if Google is going to basically hellban me, and since almost all of my contacts are on Gmail anyway, I'd just transition to a Gmail account to talk to them. I only have one contact that's not on Gmail, and it's an acquaintance I'll probably not talk to again. Maybe I'll keep the server running just for decentralized geek-cred. At least Google is nice enough to let me use a desktop client, for now.
I also noticed Google doesn't seem to support encryption on federated chats. I guess the proper solution is something like OTR anyway, but that was disappointing to see.
I ran my own xmpp server for a long time as well. Once gmail stopped federating xmpp (hangouts "upgrade"), most of my contacts just...went dark -- they still showed as online, but they never got messages anymore. The few contacts who also ran their own servers, or used a public one, eventually gave up and stopped using it too, probably because most of their friends were on gmail too.
So yeah. I think xmpp is pretty much dead, and google killed it.
Oddly, irc still lives on!
The whole situation is irritating. Federated XMPP is technically the solution.
However, it's in the best interest of Google, Apple, Facebook, WhatsApp etc to intentionally fragment chat, at the expense of every internet user. It's short sighted in the long run.
I still keep my server on. There are only a handful of contacts left, but it's mostly out of stubbornness. I hope it comes back around eventually.
XMPP is dead. The only people you can reach over XMPP are technically minded people and you can already reach more of them via IRC. XMPP didn't manage to spread. It's over.
I think you may feel this as you don't see all the organisations that use XMPP internally for their office communications and video conferencing. We use it internally, we have rooms for each department and some group rooms that are very active - when a new person starts with us they often comment how good it is to have a functional internal chat system. We have OTR encryption for confidential exchanges such as providing users with passwords and developers with SQL from databases etc...
Cisco apparently didn't get the message, as their unified communications runs on XMPP. And I believe their share of the communications market segment is large enough to consider XMPP anything but dead.
Plenty of places use XMPP, they just end up running it over some proprietary transport protocol so it doesn't interoperate with anything else. Federated XMPP on the other hand is dead with its eulogy delivered by Google.
Situation with instant messaging is still a huge mess. Especially with Google deserting XMPP efforts. I lost majority of my contacts after this Hangouts fiasco. Everyone should thank Eric Schmidt for this.
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|10 years ago|reply
But since then, I have realised a big problem with it - no-one uses it! Today I communicate with the world by iMessage, SMS, Twitter, and email. "Instant messaging" just seems to have died as a concept entirely, replaced by yet more walled gardens like Snapchat.
My XMPP server is being turned off for good, next week.
[+] [-] scintill76|10 years ago|reply
Don't take my word too heavily, as this was just what I saw in a quick test with one Gmail account of my own. But I decided if Google is going to basically hellban me, and since almost all of my contacts are on Gmail anyway, I'd just transition to a Gmail account to talk to them. I only have one contact that's not on Gmail, and it's an acquaintance I'll probably not talk to again. Maybe I'll keep the server running just for decentralized geek-cred. At least Google is nice enough to let me use a desktop client, for now.
I also noticed Google doesn't seem to support encryption on federated chats. I guess the proper solution is something like OTR anyway, but that was disappointing to see.
[+] [-] stock_toaster|10 years ago|reply
So yeah. I think xmpp is pretty much dead, and google killed it. Oddly, irc still lives on!
[+] [-] dingus|10 years ago|reply
However, it's in the best interest of Google, Apple, Facebook, WhatsApp etc to intentionally fragment chat, at the expense of every internet user. It's short sighted in the long run.
I still keep my server on. There are only a handful of contacts left, but it's mostly out of stubbornness. I hope it comes back around eventually.
[+] [-] BostonEnginerd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkarneges|10 years ago|reply
The situation is hopeless.
[+] [-] legulere|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smcleod|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tw04|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DominikR|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiralpolitik|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|10 years ago|reply