I worked on an XMPP client for a while, many years ago, for a proprietary chat system that used ejabberd as a back end. The protocol is/was awful.

On a related note, AOL should've open sourced and federated AIM. Everyone in the late 90's, early 2000's was on it.

> Everyone in the late 90's, early 2000's was on it.

Outside the United States, very few people were on it. When I signed up to play some video games with some US friends from a forum, I remember having to Google a valid US address and it's matching ZIP code as it wouldn't even let me sign up without one.

MSN was more popular in western Europe and as I understand it ICQ (eventually federated and shared some tech, but not the same network) was the top early IM in eastern Europe. Can't comment on the rest of the world at that time but I doubt the sign-up form was any more accepting of Korean addresses for example.

ICQ was also huge in Italy and, I understand, most of western Europe, at the turn of the millennium. Then MSN took over.

Imagine if the global phone network was balkanized like messaging networks...

We asked them to. I was in the room. They said no.

TBF, we asked them to let us use the protocol, or make it part of IMPP, or get actively involved in IMPP.

> AOL should've open sourced and federated AIM

afaik AIM was a derivative of ICQ, but yea those were the good times. today i know more ppl that won't touch whatsapp then there were w/o icq numbers back than, probably the closest we've got to a ubiquitous instant messanging. i still remember my icq# althou i havent used it in like 15y and have burned throu like five phone numbers since.

Not all parts of the protocol are awful. Many stupid extensions (XEPs) sure are bad, chiefly, MUCs.

However, this breaking down of the protocol to small components is the strength of the protocol, not a weakness.

Yes, I was actually working quite a bit with MUCs, now that I remember it!

the MUC is not good. this is true. there is MIX, XEP-0369, that has a way better under-the-hood approach that re-uses a lot of the existing XEPs (whereas MUC was early & kind of it's own thing).

alas MIX adoption is very low. ejabberd got MIX support in 2016 but it's stayed at 0.1.0. and, more pressingly, i don't think any clients support it. this has to change for XMPP to pass MVP muster. https://www.reddit.com/r/xmpp/comments/arpruf/what_clients_s...

Running an XMPP server is much easier than running a mail server.

I know, I've run both for a number of years.

Very few people need clustering support.

My use cases were a large social app with chat and a AAA game with team chat. This was almost a decade ago but in both cases a single server was deemed insufficient by our ops people. I suppose you're right, though. I've never had to maintain a mail system of similar scale.

Mail is async in nature, XMPP has some expectancy to work as fast as possible (avoiding the term realtime here).