Hi Sylvain, thank you for this data point. Yes, XMPP the protocol is alive and well. The discussion in this thread, besides really being of very little use, conflates the trajectory of XMPP the protocol with that of “Jabber”. When we say “Jabber”, we think about people who have Jabber accounts on some public Jabber server that is part of a single global Jabber network. These people are using client software to access their Jabber account and send and receive messages. Jabber is a user service, a bit like the way e-mail is a user service. XMPP is a protocol, a bit like SMTP being a protocol. Both protocols are strongly associated with a specific user service (*), but the protocol and the traditionally dominant user service are not the same. The Jabber user service is what’s waning, for two reasons: — Jabber servers vanishing, making it harder for people to have and maintain “my Jabber account”. — Client implementations getting harder to configure and use; general bitrot in the presence of new OS versions and other changes to the protocol landscape. While the e-mail user service is in an interesting global transition, it does not experience these two specific effects at the same level of impact, so the intensity of this development is a thought-provoking diagnostic for Jabber. Grüße, Carsten (*) (To complete the analogy on the other side, SMTP of course can be used (and is being used) for other things than the e-mail user service I described. While under heavy competition from HTTP callbacks, this type of SMTP communication continues being used.)
