The author of Conversations recently wrote up the state of XMPP in 2016: https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html
So, though you may not be using it anymore, XMPP is far from a dead end.
[ed: submitted that to hn, as I'm sure many people would be interested in an update on XMPP from someone that actually works with XMPP implementations:
Oh right, I didn't know they have my whole Android address book before. I recommend you to download the data Facebook has about you (they don't give all, but a fair amount) https://www.facebook.com/help/302796099745838
I was actually surprised at the sheer amount of my personal life contained in that file.
It is Apache wave. And nothing is dead if a community wants it to be alive.
I really, really would like to see this happen, but if the past decade and a half is any indication, the ones taking over will be newer centralized, ad monetized systems. Most of the non-tech people don't care much about privacy or lock-in. I keep trying very often to explain to people why privacy is important and why platforms like FB/WhatsApp, etc., are not good. It's an uphill battle though, and most people don't get it or feel it's too much of a hassle to change their habits and that of the people in their networks.
Maybe that's an idea for an open source Android demo app - one that requests a certain set of (or all possible) permissions, and then simply displays the status of those permissions (granted/blocked).
At least, since they're closing access from alternative sources, they're slowly succeeding in driving me off facebook. At least if I now have to move to an app, I'll pick one that supports end-to-end encryption (which facebook+xmpp+otr did fine, btw, until they killed it).
I wonder how quickly things will turn in the coming decades, as the incumbent network silos continue to screw users on the altar of data mining and ad revenue, and anyone can start a competing product for free (up to ~thousands of users at least, and at that point, maybe you can find a monetization strategy or get investment to keep going until your product becomes another "big thing").
As far as I can gather, XMPP is pretty much a dead end at this point, Google Wave is open, but also dead as a spec. So what'll presumably happen, is that eventually someone will find a new, sane, extensible and open protocol, and it will take over. We now know some things that other protocols were missing: easy serialization, sane hypermedia, sane extensions, sane push, sane presence, sane async and sync modes (mail and im w/server side archiving) end to end encryption, and some form of trust or other way to mitigate spam. I'm guessing it'll be json based with perhaps swappable transport. Probably should be encapsulated in message-level authenticated encryption. And it'll probably be another five years before we see it realized.