> But why wouldn't it be possible to have these two in the same app I don't believe it's "impossible" to have both in a same app, it's just that the kind of hi

> But why wouldn't it be possible to have these two in the same app I don't believe it's "impossible" to have both in a same app, it's just that the kind of high-density UI and advanced features you depend upon for high-volume chats rarely intersect with family-scale/1-to-one chats, so you either make compromises that directly affect usability/efficiency, or you essentially end-up with 2 chat paradigms at odds in a same client. > As to whether one protocol can address both use cases: Maybe it doesn't need to either? It depends what you mean by protocol in this case. Chat rooms (MUCs in the XMPP verbiage) are handled by a specific component, so it's practically happening the way you describe, but at its core, the "message-passing" (stanza-based) nature of the XMPP protocol doesn't change.