This is the thing that really boils me. I mean, we can debate whether XMPP is a great protocol, but for a brief window it seemed like we’d have an open chat standard with at least one big stalwart to bring in the normals.
But then Google flipped us the bird and took their ball and went home. Their AMPification plans for email and my residual anger over screwing us over with XMPP was the straw that finally made me switch my vanity domain from Google to Fastmail.
EDIT: Every tech company seems to want to re-Compuserve us :-(
In fairness, Facebook pulled a similar stunt with messenger. It's marginally redeeming that their Android messenger app isn't terrible, but really annoying to lose the xmpp client connect abilityability, and any useful desktop client.
Apparently Google did allow broken (no tls) server side federation too - so they screwed us over twice - both on client and server.
But then Google flipped us the bird and took their ball and went home. Their AMPification plans for email and my residual anger over screwing us over with XMPP was the straw that finally made me switch my vanity domain from Google to Fastmail.
EDIT: Every tech company seems to want to re-Compuserve us :-(