Definitely what Conversations author is doing is a big step in the right direction. I managed to convert some friend and one of my sibling to it.
In term of paid offer for server hosting, I struggle a bit to see who's the target. I would expect that tech enthusiasts who really care about Internet's freedom as a whole to already have some level of self-hosting and knowledge to setup their own server (that's what I'm doing)
Non tech users will not really expect to have to pay for a server, I think that most of them would only think of Instant messaging as the client app (a bit like for email).
Maybe I'm saying crap because my knowledge of XMPP is very limited, but I would think that for XMPP to take on in the instant messaging space, it means that the protocol itself has to be focused on that. From there some form of versioning of the protocol that could mean that for a server or a client to be considered compatible with a version of the protocol, it needs to support a set of versioned XEP.
I think that would make things easier for a people who are writing XMPP app to focus on a common set of goals.
> In term of paid offer for server hosting, I struggle a bit to see who's the target.
To be honest, me too. But hosted versions of free-software are often popular, if only to support financially the maintainers. For example, the wallabag.it maintainer had a blogpost detailing his revenues over the past years running such hosting service: https://nicolas.loeuillet.org/billets/quatre-annees-de-walla... (in french but you can probably understand the numbers)
Although there is demand for collaboration services from non-profits and coops who often rely on Google services. Those who have a somewhat-techie person on board usually selfhost with Yunohost (at least in the french-speaking world where it has become popular) but others pay for external services from a tech coop (eg. webarch.coop). In this usecase, "clients" usually don't want to deal with a bunch of subscriptions from various provider and will go with someone who can do web/email/IM (at least).
Then there's the compliance suites, published every year (for 3 years now i believe) to document the required/recommended specifications to implement for specific use-cases (eg. web client, audio/video, etc). The latest one is here: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0443.html
Overall the ecosystem is progressing better/faster than it was a decade ago. But new suggestions/critique are always welcome to keep improving things :)
EDIT: I should also mention modernxmpp.org project which is useful for developing clients nowadays.
In term of paid offer for server hosting, I struggle a bit to see who's the target. I would expect that tech enthusiasts who really care about Internet's freedom as a whole to already have some level of self-hosting and knowledge to setup their own server (that's what I'm doing)
Non tech users will not really expect to have to pay for a server, I think that most of them would only think of Instant messaging as the client app (a bit like for email).
Maybe I'm saying crap because my knowledge of XMPP is very limited, but I would think that for XMPP to take on in the instant messaging space, it means that the protocol itself has to be focused on that. From there some form of versioning of the protocol that could mean that for a server or a client to be considered compatible with a version of the protocol, it needs to support a set of versioned XEP.
I think that would make things easier for a people who are writing XMPP app to focus on a common set of goals.