Regardless of how you classify them, nobody was ever going to figure out how to sideload a jabber client onto their flip phones or iphone 1 or blackberries.

And that is kind of the thing. Maybe Google got a larger market share of the IM market (I assume AIM was still dominant in the US and ICQ in the rest of the world) by using XMPP but better. But the market got wiped out by SMS and imessage and now is mostly shared between (depending on your country) whatsapp, line, and the imessage. ... And I still use Hangouts.

Even if XMPP had been dominant on PC (which is not at all what EEE is about but...), it would not have survived as people shifted away from sitting at a computer and typing and moved toward stopping in the middle of the sidewalk and using their thumbs on a phone screen.

I think we're more likely to see users move from Threads to Mastodon than the other direction.

I keep seeing people say things like this, but it's just naive. Meta isn't spending billions of dollars just to give their captive audience an offramp.