XMPP is the prime example of too little too late. XMPP missed both the shift to mobile and the shift to more engaging and complex messaging.

There is a nice overview in "The State of Mobile XMPP in 2016"[1] where you can see how far behind XMPP is compared to nearly everything else. By 2016 nearly everyone could work over mobile networks, offline messaging, push notifications, syncing between multiple devices, file uploads, end-to-end encryption etc. XMPP had a plethora of experimental XEPs with unknown support across clients and servers. And not much has changed in the past year.

So let's say you have the only client in existence that supports all these XEPs, Conversations for Android [2]. What can you do with it? Oh, you'd have to find a server that supports all your features and talk to people on the same client. And that's about it. For everybody else you're stuck with plain text messages.

It will only get worse for XMPP. AliChat and WeChat has long been the way to pay for anything in China, with over a trillion dollars flowing through their systems annually. Apple, Facebook, Google, Telegram are busy adding payment capabilities to their platforms. It will be years before a relevant XEP is drafted, and another few years before maybe one client and maybe one server will start supporting it.

[1] https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html [2] https://conversations.im

Yeah and email doesn't have hardly of those features either. It's basically just text or perhaps HTML. Sending files is super inefficient and awkward. Encryption is hardly supported on clients.

None of that changes the fact that email is a useful and reliable way to send a text message to someone. In the same way XMPP is a useful and reliable way to send a text message to someone. If all you have is a lowest common denominator there is no point in dismissing it for something that doesn't exist.

> Yeah and email doesn't have hardly of those features either

That's why:

- there have been countless attempts to improve email (anything from threading, to automatic contact info to inline images to file previews, to adding interactivity to emails, to... to...)

- the younger generation prefers anything but email

Slack has the saving grace of optionally supporting an XMPP gateway, for those still committed to that dream. For now.

(I sincerely hope this comment isn't too prescient.)

They don’t do federation. And it doesn’t work very well.

Indeed, Federation was only a part of their Enterprise offering. :rimshot: It is only Slack-to-Slack, so it is not interoperable in that way. Shared channels are a thing now too, and danged if I can keep up with all the new bells and whistles.

Slack is very much an organizational groupware product, with chat done well. Not the utopia federated XMPP promises, but frankly, XML just needs to die. (Which, not coincidentally, is part of what attracted me to work on the telehash specification.)

And indeed, an IRC gateway.