Federated services don't allow companies to lock you into wallen gardens.
The big tech companies don't know how to make money without walled gardens (Thiel's book more or less makes this gospel without actually saying it)...hence, XMPP lost.
You can go look at XMPP or any other protocol and yeah it has issues, but no more than any other protocol, and none that couldn't be fixed.
But it's not obvious to find a working business model worth billions out of that, so companies that have to make billions don't want that. And of course government only cares about billion dollar companies (they don't have more reliable signaling), so...the fate of the protocols. There's usually a lot of bike-shedding after the fact, but they ignore the real reasons behind failure of adoption.
There's already been multiple waves of centralization, decentralization, and so on:
In the late 90s you had ICQ, MSN, AIM, etc, by the mid 2000s those had been reversed engineered to be open, new protocols were made (XMPP) and even adopted by the new giants, then Facebook, Google, etc closed back down.
> Federated services don't allow companies to lock you into wallen gardens.
This does not explain why small (niche) players go that route, too. It seems you overlooked the second part of the question: While I understand that big players like WhatsApp want to bind all users to their own infrastructure, I don't understand why even the niche instant messangers go through the burden of creating their own infrastructure (or relying on Google's) instead of just concentrating on the client side to provide better XMPP clients.
Conversations (mentioned in a different sub-thread) is a nice example of a niche instant messenger focusing on good UX. It is not only standards-compliant, but the author is actively contributing XMPP extensions, moving forward the state of XMPP art.
I don't know much about niche messengers which are not based on XMPP, but most XMPP clients happen to be niche projects themselves, maintained by one or two persons in their spare time.
The argument usually is along the lines of: "it can't work because it didn't work".
Niche players take their cues from the crowd, too. If a bunch of people in a forum say that tech is bad and that's the dominant mindset, it's going to limit the people who give it a shot.
The big tech companies don't know how to make money without walled gardens (Thiel's book more or less makes this gospel without actually saying it)...hence, XMPP lost.
You can go look at XMPP or any other protocol and yeah it has issues, but no more than any other protocol, and none that couldn't be fixed.
But it's not obvious to find a working business model worth billions out of that, so companies that have to make billions don't want that. And of course government only cares about billion dollar companies (they don't have more reliable signaling), so...the fate of the protocols. There's usually a lot of bike-shedding after the fact, but they ignore the real reasons behind failure of adoption.
There's already been multiple waves of centralization, decentralization, and so on:
In the late 90s you had ICQ, MSN, AIM, etc, by the mid 2000s those had been reversed engineered to be open, new protocols were made (XMPP) and even adopted by the new giants, then Facebook, Google, etc closed back down.
As Slack is currently doing with IRC. Fun stuff.