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I think the writing was on the wall for XMPP once people started chatting on Facebook and Facebook got past their brief XMPP compatible phase. Then Google also
by neltnerb 5y ago
I think the writing was on the wall for XMPP once people started chatting on Facebook and Facebook got past their brief XMPP compatible phase. Then Google also deprecated it.
It's a nice protocol, but if you're missing all the conversations it doesn't help. When it was popular, it was the system that let you connect Yahoo to Google to MSN to Facebook to Zephyr to... it's network effects, people have to be on it for anyone to want to use it.
- xorcist 5y agoGoogle was federating from the start. Then Facebook started winning customers over, and they weren't. So Google also closed. When that happened, the writing was on the wall for XMPP at Google. If you are not federating, there's no reason to follow the spec. It's a variation of the prisoner's dilemma. If one party shares and the other doesn't, the market becomes lopsided. It's why every big permissively licensed non-copyleft product so far hasn't managed to build an ecosystem outside of a few select distributors. With protocol specifications the problem is much harder. Market dominance can be maintained by slight incompatibilities.