Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand why people have seemingly abandoned vanilla XMPP. It's a great, flexible, powerful, and yes standard and open, protocol.
XMPP is great for what it was designed for. It doesn't work well with mobile, high packet loss & high latency connections. XMPP is talkative and bandwidth intensive - bad for limited data/battery applications. It also wasn't designed for today's 1 person multiple devices reality. Most XMPP servers let you log in multiple times but messages don't sync between clients and sometimes get delivered to the client the user isnt currently in front of.
Also, sending files over XMPP has pretty much always sucked - there are a bunch of incompatible ways to do it and it's always been hit and miss depending on which client your chat partner was using, network topography, etc.
People that moved to Hangouts aren't available on GTalk (the xmpp part). I run my own XMPP server, people that have ancient Android 2.x mobiles and don't buy into the G+ nonsense can talk to me. People with more modern systems/that 'upgraded' to Hangout cannot.
Since my server cannot magically filter these people I came to the conclusion that Google _doesn't_ support xmpp, federation or not, for most of their users anymore.
(If you manage to access GTalk again, for example by running the GTalk thingy in GMail/the browser, you can talk to me again. I've got a hard time making my friends do that to contact me)
For all intents and purposes Google's XMPP support is broken.
> People that moved to Hangouts aren't available on GTalk (the xmpp part). I run my own XMPP server, people that have ancient Android 2.x mobiles and don't buy into the G+ nonsense can talk to me. People with more modern systems/that 'upgraded' to Hangout cannot.
True, but this is "only" a client problem. What is first and foremost important is the support server-side.
This ugly situation is just like if everyone suddenly decided en-masse to stop using their XMPP client of choice.
This is partly "waking up to reality" for the XMPP community, partly a huge tragedy for the lack of diversity in how people (used to) communicate over XMPP
...but none of these thing would impede Jaconda's users to receive notifications on their desktop or their mobile.
(If anything, I'd consider developers (Jaconda's users) more likely to have an actual XMPP client, rather than strictly relying only on what Google provides by default)
They just (~now~) sent out messages to GTalk users, telling them that Gtalk-the-desktop-app support will be terminated on the 16th of February, like .. in a couple of days from now.
For me Google's xmpp support is nonexistent, I understand Jaconda's attitude.
We are using it ourselves as both XMPP and Telegram messenger. But the truth is, we are not planning to develop a stand-alone messenger. XMPP messengers are slowly sinking and Telegram looks like a nicer alternative. Especially considering Telegram's team showing interest in our project.
>"XMPP messengers are slowly sinking"
I'm sure telegram is a good choice for your company, but "XMPP messengers are slowly sinking", I think, is a silly statement.
This is my personal opinion I've gathered from experience. I still have some friends using XMPP from Gtalk times. I have 0 new XMPP contacts for years since the fall of Gtalk. One might argue that it is still going strong, but I don't see anything proving that point. And the most authoritative indicator for ourselves is the amount of companies signed up for Jaconda. Guess having to add DNS records so XMPP is working on your domain is not helping either.
I assume it's because not every server (most notably: google's) support the XEP for offline messages, and having to always keep a connection to the remote server is mobile/battery-unfriendly.
All these newfangled alternatives usually rely on the Google services' push notifications api afaik.
Also, sending files over XMPP has pretty much always sucked - there are a bunch of incompatible ways to do it and it's always been hit and miss depending on which client your chat partner was using, network topography, etc.
More from the project: https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-why-did-you-go-for-a-cus...