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Comment by singpolyma3 | Hacker News Reader

> I am genuinely interested in hearing why we collectively ditched XMPP

We didn't. It was never very popular, and is today more popular that it has ever been.

It wasn’t popular? I remember using pidgin to talk to friends on google chat, facebook and my work contacts. It was glorious.

I haven’t had a reason to use an xmpp client in over a decade.

Same! Pidgin was such a great piece of software

We're still here... https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/news

Likely you do or have without knowing it. The protocol is used in telecom quite a bit for all sorts of things. Jitsi is built on XMPP. Lots of games use it for chat - league of legends and unreal engine I believe. Xmpp shows up in all sorts of places if you look.

Pidgin is a multi protocol client. Not an XMPP client.

Depends if you mean just the technology or using it in the small federated spirit. Google Talk and Facebook Messenger were XMPP all the way through and worked with vanilla XMPP clients. Slack wasn't XMPP but supported it via a gateway until it was dropped.

Not sure how popular the small federation was back then, but I know Mac OS X Server touted an XMPP server and that was a first-class feature of iChat.

> Google Talk and Facebook Messenger were XMPP all the way through and worked with vanilla XMPP clients

I remember this, it was great to connect to absolutely every chat platform with bitlbee and pretend that all my chats were just DMs on some irc server somewhere

Facebook was also a gateway like slack, but not as good as slack's gateway.

Google Talk was real and federated XMPP before they killed the product.

Oh, I mean Facebook Chat not Facebook Messenger. Supposedly that was ejabberd.

Forgot to mention the original WhatsApp was ejabberd under the hood but ofc was heavily modified and didn't work with regular XMPP clients

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