[yourapostasy]

There are a slew of developers who tangled with XMPP and came away with very negative, well-founded reasons to dislike the protocol. Do you want XMPP because it is a standard, or you also have a contrary experience to these developers?

[1] http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber

[2] http://josephg.com/blog/xmpp-in-wave-in-a-box/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810

[4] https://www.reddit.com/comments/rvzdp

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040302

For some balance, there are contrary opinions. This one seems to revolve around project governance.

[6] http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber

And links [4] and [5] have a lot of people piping up saying they like XMPP just fine.

To be fair to XMPP, I strongly suspect it is a protocol trying to solve a very large, very messy problem space, and too many developers are trying to wrestle with it "raw" in its totality, unaware that for their specific problem domain, they only need a subset, and a specialized protocol/library that exposes only that subset to them. It's almost as if too few understand that XMPP is kind of the assembly language (or microcode?) of its problem domain, and most people need a $High_Level_Language_of_Choice instead.

[finnn]

I just like jabber because it's a standard. I have an app on my phone that'll do Jabber already. There's a lot of server software already out there to host Jabber, it's pretty robust, all we need is a reasonable frontend for desktop

[elithrar]

The counter to that—and no doubt a factor for many like Slack—is that when you use a custom protocol/API you get to control the whole experience. You don't have to deal with bugs in third-party clients, wait for clients to get emoji support, and can control the look-and-feel (many of the Jabber apps I've seen aren't great).

This is obviously not ideal for everyone, but I suspect that outside of tech that using a custom client is possibly even a plus.