And you're basing this on what?

I do concede that XMPP is not the new shiny, but it is very far from dead.

It powers more things than you realise, a few are listed at https://xmpp.org/uses/

There is healthy growth in server count: https://blog.prosody.im/2020-retrospective/

Development is very active, across a diverse range of projects: https://xmpp.org/category/newsletter.html

Whoa I had no idea! Thanks for sharing!

Jabber/XMPP ecosystem is far from dead. If anything, my perspective as an end-user for quite a long time is there's been more community-oriented developments in the past few years, than in the entire previous decade.

Some clients/servers are unfortunately unmaintained and the XMPP Standards Foundation has a neutral position which prevents it from advertising specific clients which have good UX and modern features. But modern clients like Conversations, Dino, Siskin and Gajim are certainly good messengers with hardware and feature support i haven't seen in other ecosystems (client & server side low resource requirements, good Tor support client, and vast plugin ecosystems) though there's some dearly-missed functionality (eg. groups of chatrooms like matrix spaces).

If you're curious about interesting developments, libervia (ex salut-à-toi) is the only federated piece of software i know that is selfhosting its own development (forge). Tickets and merge requests for libervia are done via libervia itself. They've been doing that for almost 3 years now, using mercurial as a backend but implemented in a way that other DVCS backends can be supported. See my blogpost about decentralized forging for more context on that https://staticadventures.netlib.re/blog/decentralized-forge/

Thanks for sharing!