No Stupid Questions

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

I used xmpp, and also Gtalk, both of them. Talking both between xmpp clients and Gtalk users.

XMPP was a mess. Messages often didn't arrive if target was on a different server. And different clients had different encryption and encoding standards, so even if it arrived it wasn't always readable (or just completely ignored by the client). Images seldom worked across different clients.

The only way to make it work reliable was if everyone was on the same server with the same client with the same client version. That is, if the server itself hadn't crashed.

The reason Google stopped the link was because while it had very little of legit messages on the platform, it had most of the spam and trolling. XMPP servers were the "soft underbelly" of Google talk, with the small server admins not having the resources to deal with bad actors even remotely as good as Google.

I did. I got hired as a Unix admin around 2008 and inheriteted the care and feeding of an old Jabber server the ~3000 employee company was using for internal instant messaging. I near-immediately migrated it over to an OpenFire server. A few months later I learned the pitfalls of using the built-in database (it blows up on you when it gets big enough cuz back then it was all in-memory, not sure about how it works out of the box now). I remember figuring out how to manually migrate that over to mysql... and I skipped the ITSM change control process and just had it execute overnight via some at commands and scripts. Went smoothly and I didn't get fired :P

I learned a bunch from that and set up an OpenFire server at home so I could chat from my dynamic dns hostname to some people on gchat.

And that's about the extent of it. My internal company chat eventually got replaced with skype for business and then teams. My personal stuff eventually switched over to text messages and Signal (and discord and slack and mattermost and whatever else for all the odds and ends communities I keep in touch with).

I grew up at this time and never heard of XMPP. Most kids I know used AIM or MSN, which eventually got replaced by a combination of Myspace/Facebook/Skype and SMS on our cell phones (especially when mobile plans started commonly offering unlimited talk and text plans). I feel like those products became far more of a blow to services like jabber than google talk who I don't remember anyone really using. I could be wrong though

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 think Xfire and Raptr utilized XMPP.

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 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.

I still use it with a couple of friends on a private server.

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 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).

We used XMPP for chat (OpenFire) at my work for a while. I used to use it in one of those multi-protocol chat clients (it was Trillian, if I recall).

I had never heard of it either and I've been online since the 90s.

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 had never heard of XMPP before.

No clue what XMPP is or any of its history, but I've used it.

I used it. Even at some point I wrote simple web client for it.

I still run my own xmpp server!

But I'm the only one who has an account on it :/

Used to use OpenFire / Spark at work for years, so was aware of the protocol.

I have! ✋🏾

Yupp. Used it a lot. Both under others brand names (like in gchat and a bunch of games have used xmpp under the jood for their lobby chats).

Hosted a ejabberd for years. So yeah it and irc where the primary was to chat with friends.

But transports where so and so fun to host. So for a time I connected with bitlbee to jabber and some other protocols.

But grew tired of both keeping a irc bouncer, bitlbee and the jabber stuff running. And a disk crash while I was a cash strapped student was the final drop.

So went irc/email only for a while.

But now years later I'm running a matrix server with several bridges. And that's far easier especially since it's not lxc based hosting I setup but docker.

I used it a lot for Eve Online. Lots of big alliances/corps in the game defaulted to XMPP. Some used IRC or Slack when it came out. Nowadays everyone uses Discord though.

I used it so my IRC client would bridge to Google Talk via Bitlbee. It was super nice.