Oh, I totally get what you're saying, except that I don't find usage of XMPP clients to be that useful. Yes, I know that Facebook supported at some point XMPP c

Oh, I totally get what you're saying, except that I don't find usage of XMPP clients to be that useful. Yes, I know that Facebook supported at some point XMPP clients. I never cared about it. Real interoperability is federation. If we had federation, the problem of using your favorite client would be moot. My argument is that there never was a "golden age" of chat, unless you refer to IRC back in the nineties and even that would be debatable. And out of the big boys I can only name Google's Talk as supporting federation, only to be killed and replaced by Hangouts, that doesn't support federation because, wouldn't you know, they needed to innovate and couldn't do that while supporting XMPP, allegedly. And even if Hangouts pushed WebRTC forward, I'm glad it's not used and I'm glad that it suffers a slow death, because this proves that the innovation argument is bullshit. And I'm fairly certain that Google Talk was more popular than Hangouts, even if Hangouts got pushed down the throats of every Android user.