XMPP: The Gem of Instant Messaging

I think its not only the clients...Rather its what the server side supports and to ensure clients align with that....And i think among a group of techy friends, well, they can coordinate the proper settings...but it becomes thorny when involving some not-techie buddies...Of course its possible, but, you know, the onboarding process is less than ideal. I say that not being an xmpp guru of coruse, so YMMV.

> I am really surprised there isn't a venture backed company pushing XMPP forward. Maybe people have tried and realized it's not viable.

Actually, WhatsApp would fulfill your definition there. They are/were a startup whose entire product/platform is an xmpp client (using their centralized server/instance). Now, whether they pushed "xmpp forward", or merely would be considered pushing a chat platform and who cares whats under the covers...well, that i leave as an exercise for you or others to decide/opine. ;-)

I don't know that it was ever "over complicated and hard to implement" (see my response to the thing you're quoting above, I think), at least, not any more so than any protocol, but I'm still not really sure what the specific complaints are when people mention this, maybe you could elaborate on what's hard to implement? Most people just grab an XMPP library and go, you don't normally have to implement XMPP itself to make a client (just like you don't implement HTTP when you want to make a request, you go snag a library that does this for you).

XMPP was not a mobile friendly protocol for a while, had efficiently no security out of the box and lacked simplest things like image or other file transfers.

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Slightly rambling partial agreement ahead, sorry, I struggle with how I feel about this and need to write something longer somewhere:

I think there's a tendency to dismiss this argument in the XMPP community (but there's a lot of truth to it, I choose to use the XMPP desktop clients but none of them are as nice to use as any big commercial IM providers client), but also a tendency for people to make this argument without realizing that they're comparing open source projects run by one or two people to VC funded projects with a company backing them. Of course Discord or Element or whatever will be "better" in some ways, they have a team and millions of VC funding behind them. However, one of the many reasons I chose to use XMPP back in the day when I was first evaluating whether to use it or Matrix, and one of the big reasons I got more heavily involved in the community later, was specifically because the standards body wasn't strictly tied to a company looking for VC funding (and all the individual client/server projects I've contributed to are the same). But, this does mean there aren't really any clients that I'm in love with (but there are clients for every random niche platform imaginable, which I think is probably more important personally).

All that being said, try Snikket if you haven't. It's relatively new, but I think they're really doing a good job of creating a suite of clients that can be recommended to "normies" who don't want to sacrifice shiny graphics for the sake of using something that's a bit more free from VC influence.