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This is already implemented in modern XMPP clients like Conversations. See https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0352.html

That's why I don't think it was more than a fig leaf for Google's true reasons for closing up their chat network. That was during the period where they were axing anything trying out-Facebook Facebook and I wouldn't trust the stated rationale for any of those decisions.

It would be interesting to see whether Facebook/WhatsApp and iMessage have made them desperate enough to reverse course on XMPP but I'm skeptical that they'd be trusted enough to be successful.

In fact, Google already had a precursor to XEP-0352 called `google:queue`, but as I remember the stated reason for shutting down XMPP as being "spam"¹. Google apparently can't deal with spam in a federated communication system ...

¹ https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/00... and then https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-May/001680....

Yeah, it’s sad. I can get not peering with the world but it’s not like they couldn’t do something like an open CA-style agreement to follow certain standards as a condition to peering. If they’d done that, they’d be in a much better position to ask governments to require federation with an open protocol.

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