> In term of paid offer for server hosting, I struggle a bit to see who's the target. To be honest, me too. But hosted versions of free-software are often popu

> In term of paid offer for server hosting, I struggle a bit to see who's the target. To be honest, me too. But hosted versions of free-software are often popular, if only to support financially the maintainers. For example, the wallabag.it maintainer had a blogpost detailing his revenues over the past years running such hosting service: https://nicolas.loeuillet.org/billets/quatre-annees-de-wallabag-it https://nicolas.loeuillet.org/billets/quatre-annees-de-walla... (in french but you can probably understand the numbers) Although there is demand for collaboration services from non-profits and coops who often rely on Google services. Those who have a somewhat-techie person on board usually selfhost with Yunohost (at least in the french-speaking world where it has become popular) but others pay for external services from a tech coop (eg. webarch.coop). In this usecase, "clients" usually don't want to deal with a bunch of subscriptions from various provider and will go with someone who can do web/email/IM (at least). > some form of versioning of the protocol That's already the case. Clients and servers expose the features they support as part of the disco protocol: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0030.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0030.html Then there's the compliance suites, published every year (for 3 years now i believe) to document the required/recommended specifications to implement for specific use-cases (eg. web client, audio/video, etc). The latest one is here: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0443.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0443.html Overall the ecosystem is progressing better/faster than it was a decade ago. But new suggestions/critique are always welcome to keep improving things :) EDIT: I should also mention modernxmpp.org project which is useful for developing clients nowadays.