[blancNoir]

Here's what Moxie Marlinspike has to say about the drawbacks of XMPP.

https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

"XMPP is an example of a federated protocol that advertises itself as a “living standard.” Despite its capacity for protocol “extensions,” however, it’s undeniable that XMPP still largely resembles a synchronous protocol with limited support for rich media, which can’t realistically be deployed on mobile devices. If XMPP is so extensible, why haven’t those extensions quickly brought it up to speed with the modern world?

Like any federated protocol, extensions don’t mean much unless everyone applies them, and that’s an almost impossible task in a truly federated landscape. What we have instead is a complicated morass of XEPs that aren’t consistently applied anywhere. The implications of that are severe, because someone’s choice to use an XMPP client or server that doesn’t support video or some other arbitrary feature doesn’t only affect them, it affects everyone who tries to communicate with them. It creates a climate of uncertainty, never knowing whether things will work or not. In the consumer space, fractured client support is often worse than no client support at all, because consistency is incredibly important for creating a compelling user experience."

[SamWhited]

I don't think Moxie's right though; you can still do your own thing, and have it work best with your clients which support all the features, and then allow it to federate or optionally allow third party clients on your server with limited functionality. Naturally, you can also contribute back new extensions that you develop too so that other clients and services can adopt them if you want.

But I do tend to agree in general that we need fewer features and less complexity and to push more for basic profiles that everything should implement and that have a clear compliance label.

[pseudalopex]

He wrote that after most messaging had already moved to proprietary networks. That happened primarily because Facebook and Google wanted to lock in users. The most popular desktop clients were multi-protocol clients that were slowly neglected. The most popular mobile clients were hobby projects.

Now we have uncertainty around which networks people use, which devices they use them on, and which features each network supports.