Chris Trottier on Nostr: Here’s why I don’t put a whole lot of stock in the idea that Google is entirely ...

Here’s why I don’t put a whole lot of stock in the idea that Google is entirely to blame for XMPP’s fall in popularity.

What were XMPP’s competitors?

There was ICQ. It’s dead.

Also, AIM. It’s dead too.

As for MSN Messenger, YIM, iChat? Dead! Dead! Dead!

I have no doubt that if XMPP were a proprietary product, it would be dead too. Or “extinguished” as the EEE worryworts like to say.

But XMPP is actually alive. It’s not as popular as it once was, but it’s alive. You can start up an XMPP server right now.

There’s even a version of the Fediverse that works over XMPP, instead of ActivityPub, known as Mov.im. You can sign up and use it right now.

Proprietary competitors didn’t kill XMPP. Rather, XMPP outlasted them all.

As for why XMPP isn’t more popular? There’s many reasons. XMPP is largely based on XML, and that language isn’t so popular amongst coders anymore. And this, there’s not as much impetus for developers to improve XMPP.

But also, chat has evolved. Even in the open source world, people would rather use something else. Everyone I know in the open source world rather use Matrix instead of XMPP.

While open protocols tend to persist, that doesn’t mean something else doesn’t come around to overtake it in popularity.

IRC was once incredibly popular too. You could argue it still is since Twitch uses it for text chat. But most people don’t use clients like mIRC or Chatzilla anymore.

Why is that? Because once upon a time, XMPP overtook IRC in popularity, just as Matrix has overtook XMPP right now.

Don’t entirely blame Google. Such is the way of technology.