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

I think Xfire and Raptr utilized XMPP.

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 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 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.

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

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

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 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 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).

I had never heard of XMPP before.

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edit: guess i should actually answer. I never used it, but i was curious when i got to see it in a default chat program that was bundled with ubuntu or something. I used to love the idea of proper peer to peer encrypted chat but everyone else was just so hard to get onto the same platforms and before i knew it everyone defaulted to weird things like sms, steam chat and facebook.

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.

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

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

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).

I still run my own xmpp server!

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

I have! ✋🏾

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

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

Thank you for posting some sanity.

People keep posting that dumb blog post about Google Talk being an extend, embrace, extinguish play when it's pretty obvious that Google Talk simply dwarved XMPP in terms of users. The lesson everyone here took from that is to not let any corporation near your niche protocol, when the real lesson they should've taken is that user's don't care about protocols and how open or virtuistic they are, they just want an app that's convenient to have a conversation with.

XMPP only lasted as long as it did because Google Talk kept it alive by supporting it, once they dropped it (and literally no one noticed) then XMPP died the death it would've died years earlier had Google not helped limp it along.