A pathway to a well regulated instant messaging market

For the last couple of years I have been consulting and doing contract work for various instant messaging companies. All of them use the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP); Mostly with standard extensions on standard servers. There might be a custom extension here and there but nothing that couldn’t be written down as a standard. (I’m of course not implying that all companies use XMPP, but the ones that do might contract me because that’s my area of expertise.) Using XMPP works fine for those companies. Their products might not always be a success simply because it is difficult to launch an instant messenger in 2019 where even big companies like Google and Microsoft have failed numerous times. However some of them strive in their particular niche and I’m proud to have been working with them. From talking to other developers in the XMPP community I know that many of them have made similar experiences. While the open source side of XMPP admittedly looks pretty rough at times and can not unconditionally be recommended to end users, there are plenty of closed source solutions out there that don’t usually advertise themselves as being built upon XMPP. I’m saying all this to make one particular point: If you can look past some of the open source clients that are being developed by people in their spare time (and those make up what people usually perceive as the XMPP ecosystem) there are plenty of companies who have built successful services on top of the same protocol. However those services have one thing in common; None of them are federated and none of them make it particularly easy to connect with third party clients. From my experience this is mostly due to two reasons. The first reason – and that is pretty common with the more open companies; for example those who use and advertise their use of open source software – is quality control. They are afraid of people trying to connect with one of the bad open source clients (I’m sorry but I’m looking at you Pidgin) and have a bad user experience as a result of that.