It wasn’t popular? I remember using pidgin to talk to friends on google chat, facebook and my work contacts. It was glorious.

I haven’t had a reason to use an xmpp client in over a decade.

Pidgin is a multi protocol client. Not an XMPP client.

Likely you do or have without knowing it. The protocol is used in telecom quite a bit for all sorts of things. Jitsi is built on XMPP. Lots of games use it for chat - league of legends and unreal engine I believe. Xmpp shows up in all sorts of places if you look.

Same! Pidgin was such a great piece of software