I've been running my own XMPP server for years, with federation enabled. A few years ago, it seemed like the logical successor to AIM and MSN and all those other walled garden IM systems. And how easy! My XMPP "name" was the same as my email address. One less thing to put on my business card.<p>But since then, I have realised a big problem with it - no-one uses it! Today I communicate with the world by iMessage, SMS, Twitter, and email. "Instant messaging" just seems to have died as a concept entirely, replaced by yet more walled gardens like Snapchat.<p>My XMPP server is being turned off for good, next week.
XMPP is dead. The only people you can reach over XMPP are technically minded people and you can already reach more of them via IRC. XMPP didn't manage to spread. It's over.
Plenty of places use XMPP, they just end up running it over some proprietary transport protocol so it doesn't interoperate with anything else. Federated XMPP on the other hand is dead with its eulogy delivered by Google.
Situation with instant messaging is still a huge mess. Especially with Google deserting XMPP efforts. I lost majority of my contacts after this Hangouts fiasco. Everyone should thank Eric Schmidt for this.