With all the current discussion about the threat that Instagram Threads has on the Fediverse and that article about how Google Embrace Extend Extinguished XMPP, I was left very confused, since that was the first time I’ve heard that Gchat supported XMPP or what XMPP actually is, and I’ve had my personal Gmail since beta (no, don’t ask for it), and before then, everybody was using AOL/MSN Messenger to talk with each other online. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a single person who started using Gchat as an XMPP client.
Instead of a plot where Google took over XMPP userbase via EEE, it just seem to me more like XMPP was a niche protocol that very few hardcore enthusiasts used, and then Google tried to add support for it in their product, but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the development effort to support a feature that very few of their users actually used and abandoned it in typical Google fashion.
So, to prove my point, how many people have used XMPP here, and how many people here haven’t?
I used it in the very early days with a Unix client. That’s must’ve been in the late nineties…
I’m pretty sure I used one that was terminal based, likely using ncurses. Without searching, I can’t recall the name of it, though.
I used XMPP a bit among friends, more so when Google supported it, which was probably after ICQ/AIM/MSN wasn’t as popular? I don’t really talk to many people anymore, so whatever, heheh :)
It would be nice to see XMPP make some kind of “comeback” … or some sort of popularity boost like mastodon/lemmy/etc in recent times.
Unix in the 90s must have been hardcore.
VAX.
(pun for “facts”)
VI as text editor…
X windows as GUI… Rest was terminal
GUIs are for chumps 😂 I watch all my YouTube videos as code in a terminal like the green text in the Matrix
I might have almost destroyed a monitor with bad XFree86 timings on Slackware once or twice. Pulled the plug on that thing pretty fast.