The bottom of the article links to the history (individual features) of other IM programs from that era as well like ICQ and Yahoo Messenger.
The bottom of the article links to the history (individual features) of other IM programs from that era as well like ICQ and Yahoo Messenger.
And then Jabber came to fix it by introducing an open protocol, and Google started supporting it, and all was well. But when everybody was using Google Chat they severed the Jabber compatibility, locking everyone in to their platform. Now we’re back wading around in enshittified shit and Jabber is dead.
Support matrix!! It already has international support, just needs to be a bit better with stickers and qol stuff. I’ve been using it for years. It’s nice to know I don’t have to worry about my privacy at all with chat rooms that can continue on without the original server.
It was promoted to me as a contender for Slack / IRC, not for the kind of direct messaging app that ICQ / MSN messenger was.
I wouldn’t say jabber is dead, xmpp is still pretty well used. Not enough IMO, but still in use and with readily available modern servers. Jitsi is xmpp+jingle (sip signalling) after all.
Have you tried Matrix?
People blame Google for the death of jabber because of one blog post from a disgruntled contributor but the truth is jabber was never popular and Google chat died as well.
Jabber was a mess, most of the clients were barely compatible with Each other and it was a wild west of feature support. Some clients were well featured with the ability to send richer messages, but typically only worked with a specific server and the same clients. Jabber did a crap job at making sure clients and servers interacted properly with each other and didn’t push the standards quickly enough, forcing clients to do their own thing.
Which is all Google did, they went their own way because nobody used jabber and the interoperability was causing more harm than good. It didn’t work, Google talk died and many years later clients like WhatsApp took over instead.