XMPP has changed yes. And we now have some nice clients that are compatible together and stable servers with a bunch of nice features (multi-devices sync, history management, ACK, rich messages, messages edition, encryption, battery management, push notifications…).

I'm personally working on Movim, a nice-looking "Social-IM" client fully based on XMPP (https://movim.eu/). The main goal of the project is to show that we have now all the tools to build a decentralized, standard and universal IM (and also social !) network without reinventing the wheel again and again.

You can have a look at our latest release-note as well https://pod.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim/f5f883e3122... (this blog post has been published/edited using Movim and XMPP ;)).

And Movim is also compatible with Spectrum to offer interconnection with other networks ;)

> And we now have some nice clients that are compatible together and stable servers with a bunch of nice features (multi-devices sync, history management, ACK, rich messages, messages edition, encryption, battery management, push notifications…).

Can you recommend a few? I haven't looked into XMPP in detail for a while, because the clients I've been using are "good enough and I didn't bother with mobile), but it seems like I'm missing out on good things ;)

Well I can recommend Conversations for Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conve... which have some really nice features and is fitting well with Movim.

For the desktop there is no real "modern" client yet, unfortunately. But I've ported Movim using Electron :) There is already a Ubuntu/Debian version and the package is here https://github.com/edhelas/movim_electron.

For desktop, I've heard of Adium for Mac. For Linux, the one with most decent features support is Gajim, but it is far from being perfect.

This is the first time I hear about Spectrum, actually.