[0]: https://movim.eu/
I stumble upon Matrix from time to time, but Jabber I haven't really seen anywhere in the past decade after my internet friends moved to IRC. Are there any bigger communities still using it? Back in the days Facebook Messenger was backed by it, so maybe there's still some bigger entity using it as a backbone for something?
There was a talk at FOSDEM about that.
I'm all-in on Matrix right now and use it for my family but it's a far cry from the usability that XMPP had. I am still hopeful that Matrix can live up to its promises but perhaps XMPP will always be around if that doesn't work out. Who knows!
Not my experience. I had to give up on it since it was just completely flooded with spam, and unlike mail readers that have ways to mitigate it, XMPP clients were ill prepared. Might still work if you keep your address hidden, but as chat-like alternative to a public email it just stopped working years ago.
(I once found myself in the same meeting as two of the people who made the mistakes that meant you couldn’t just pipe stuff through an XML parser and hope it worked. I tend to speak my mind)
I admit I didn't research "XMPP-based discord alternative" but maybe that says something about the ecosystem's health.
All of them seem to look like they're from the 00s!
I don't find the UX to be clunky either, but I acknowledge that could just be my familiarity with the program, so I would leave that for others to dispute.
For me, the bigger problem is that I was unable to get OMEMO + Apple Clients working properly. I think OMEMO 1 has some design flaws and hope that OMEMO 2 will fix those.