Comment by ezst

Anything that's not XMPP or based on it is inferior, IMO. And I'm not saying that for the troll (although it's easy to be dogmatic about such things). Facts are XMPP has awesome server implementations that scale to billions of users (as proven by WhatsApp/ejabberd), and developing new clients is made easy by the sheer number of libraries and platforms supported. XMPP is an established IETF standard that has a compact core and extensibility in mind (so you can remain compatible across a large spectrum of users and use cases while rolling out new and unique features). Because it's federated, it's resilient against most types of monopolistic abuses (as seen with slack and other venture capital endeavors). I would only consider P2P and other federated protocols to be worthy of my (peers) time, but I also haven't seen anything else out there that would make me want to leave the comfort of XMPP and my self hosted instance.