I think that ChatPro (or any other SV startup) is motivated in silo lock-in of their users indeed. Normal people don't care much about it, they just move to the

I think that ChatPro (or any other SV startup) is motivated in silo lock-in of their users indeed. Normal people don't care much about it, they just move to the next silo at some point. I see an interesting niche for XMPP in business deployments, basically what's currently covered by Slack, where you (as a user) often need to have multiple accounts just to participate in different teams of your BigCorp. XMPP allows a company to host their IM infrastructure on-premise or to use a service like ChatPro, and there is a business interest in requiring federation to allow easier interop with suppliers and customers. We just failed to execute on that mission so far... ;-)