Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Jaconda.im started as XMPP-based messenger hence the name – Jabber Conference derivative. And it does work with XMPP. Nothing changed in this regard. However after Google Talk was replaced with proprietary Hangouts protocol we had to look for other options. Telegram fits our concept just right. Let's see what other people think. You are welcome to participate.
It's also great to hear that it started out using XMPP, maybe Jaconda can bring XMPP back by allowing discovery based on GitHub accounts :o