The client-side story of XMPP is pretty bleak, especially if you're trying to get non-technical people to use it.

This is why we need specific services (like Slack or HipChat) that are XMPP but maintain their own ecosystem, clients, specific feature sets, etc. Then if you want to use third party clients (eg. for better accessibility, or because your platform isn't supported officially, etc.) you can, but if not you can use their clients. HipChat was almost this way (I used Mcabber with it extensively), but had just enough bits of the protocol that ignored the XMPP spec or were only accessible through a second non-XMPP channel that it was a bit annoying.

It's a real shame that the industry has forsaken the protocol in favor of walled gardens.

The reason is open protocols soon become the single biggest blocker to innovation. Open protocols stagnate and ossify. So some competitor with a proprietary system will come along and eat your lunch. That's why there have only been 2 changes in email clients ever - the move from terminal to desktop GUI and desktop GUI to web 2.0 client. That's why XMPP and IRC clients will never compete with slack (queue the 'what does slack have that IRC doesn't have thread').

I don't think it's as much that the protocol stagnates as much as it is that companies have a strong incentive to get users into their walled garden. If you use an open protocol, you can't lock people in.

We'll be trying to fix that by offering the XMPP "Team Chat" client that is much needed... https://nayego.net/ you can subscribe if you want to see the preview.

Already tried Movim :) https://movim.eu/ ? It's a fully-featured web-based XMPP client. It integrates all the modern XMPP features (message editing, history management, file-sharing, video-conferencing, publications…), it's responsive and easy to use and deploy on a self-hosted instance.

Btw. I just saw that movin is advertising 'Conversations' (Android) and 'Dino' (Desktop) as alternative clients. While I use Conversations every day and can recommend it too, on the desktop side I would recommend Gajim instead.

Over the past years I used 'Pidgin' as my desktop client, but it was not were I wanted it to be so I was actively looking for alternatives. Dino looked very promising on paper (supported XEPs) but they lack basic stuff like systray support (at least the last time I checked it out).

For a long time Gajim wasn't any better than Pidgin, but earlier this year they released their version 1.0 which added support for some more XEPs most importantly MAM (enables proper history synchronization between clients). Since that release I switched to Gajim and stopped looking for alternatives ;-)

We are trying to fix the shameful situation: https://nayego.net/ you can subscribe if you want to see the preview, but it's work in progress.

Suggestion: Have a tour of the product that doesn't require a signup. If I don't want to give you my email address, I'm left to use my imagination based on your description.

No good web front ends?

Servers seem solid and there's also ejabberd but what about clients? I want clients that are stable, cross platform and does push notification and last time I checked, there were none.

Also, I don't like the fact that it's person based whereas mattermost (and IRC) are group based that also allows person based chat.