I think it would be better if you made your point rather than asked it rhetorically. To me your argument reads like 'internet chat is currently proprietary so it always will be' but maybe I'm missing a step you'll need to fill in.

And I think part of internet discourse should allow to posit questions without actually having a big point to make. Why is it necessary to pontificate about everything?

In any case, if you want a point, whenever technical people bring up the technical superiority of X protocol or tool in a discussion, I like to ask myself this question. How many people actually use the thing that someone is telling me is so much better for the world? If it's so good, why is nobody using it for practical things? Have they used it before and there's a decline, or is it a new up and comer and it just hasn't caught on?

I think just asking the question sparks a valuable train of thought.

> In any case, if you want a point, whenever technical people bring up the technical superiority of X protocol or tool in a discussion

They are not talking about "technical superiority" though, but about "alive and kicking" and "work together pretty decently" and you followed up with a question of daily volume as somehow being the indicator of the maturity of the technology itself.

There are multiple reasons for a lack in adoption, of course. Network effects, FOMO and walled gardens, financial might and power of dominating competitors to name a couple besides just the quality of the tech itself. And it doesn't help when many people off-handedly state the technology is not good, because it is not yet as broadly adopted as the centralized giants it is trying to be an alternative too :)

Its not really a question though when everyone already knows the answer.

The 'why' you have here is a more open question and there's a lot in there. Companies trying to make money from it, users not having seen many real privacy implications on a wide scale, police presence being up and down etc. etc.

I would say XMPP may be the most widely-used chat protocol on the Internet. And it has many more uses, as it's a generic federated PubSub platform. Facebook, Whatsapp and many other popular proprietary solutions use the XMPP protocol. Even games and gaming platforms like League of Legends or Nintendo use XMPP. So do Firebase and others.

I'm not arguing in favor of these corporations. I'm a proponent of non-profit federated networks like the Jabber federation (based on XMPP protocol). Not that XMPP is better than ActivityPub/Matrix in all regards, but it has stable standards, rock-solid implementations with very good scaling stories, and there's a vibrant non-profit community working on:

- better, modern clients for chatting: Conversations, Dino.. - unified branding/UX across platforms with Snikket client/server distribution - social networking: Movim (web), salut-à-toi (multi-platform) - decentralized forging to replace github: salut-à-toi uses it for own development - onboarding people with prosody's mod_invite - federated chat over tor onion services with prosody's mod_onion

Matrix, SMTP and ActivityPub have other strong points going for them, but i could argue most of the Matrix criticism in the article does not apply to the Jabber ecosystem. Disclaimer: i'm a happy Jabber user and contributor to the https://joinjabber.org/ project (a new born in the ecosystem)

In my experience, IRC is more active than XMPP. I only get XMPP traffic from spammers and during open source conferences, whilst IRC is active daily.

Not nearly enough.

Based on some yearly port-scanning surveys [1], the developers of the Prosody XMPP server think there are over 50,000 servers running Prosody (out of a total of over 85,000 XMPP servers). There are a handful of large public servers and then what I imagine would be a very long tail of tiny private servers.

[1] https://blog.prosody.im/2020-retrospective/