FastMail: Shutting down our XMPP chat service
While the FastMail shutting down XMPP is about low usage, the real cause is that Federated Chat failed to work.<p>Federation is something that is rarely promoted in modern ecosystems. Before Twitter&#x2F;Facebook, we had RSS&#x2F;Atom, but these have all failed as companies pour massives investments into &quot;winner take all&quot; approaches to their products.   In the short term, it is easy to see why: Why compromise on iteration of features and UX by allowing a competitor to interoperate?  Why wait for a new field to be standardized in Atom?<p>We see it all the time in the consumer space, federation has died, but even look in the infrastructure space, something like Docker:  Yes, Docker Hub, is &quot;kinda&quot; open, I mean, anyone can create an account, but it&#x27;s not a federated scheme where everyone can host their own Images easily.  But we use it anyways, because its a better user experience, and its subsidized by a company not directly making revenue on it yet, but wanting to control the user experience.<p>So we drop support for any federated user experience pretty quickly.  And now we are all on Slack, on Facebook, on Twitter....  And it is mostly great.  Or we wouldn&#x27;t still be there.<p>But I still wish for a federated future, but I doubt it will happen.