If you’re at the extreme bottom there’s little chance to move upwards in capitalism but it’s comforting to have some undesirables who have it even worse than you.

Religion is not the goal of conservatives, it’s a tool to preserve hierarchy in the society. Capitalism is another tool that achieves that.

The people that aren’t wealthy but are conservative benefit from hierarchy enforced by religion. It ensures that they’re not on the bottom of society - that place is intended for various minorities.

This client looks interesting but community groups seem to be very WIP at the moment. Posts in those groups are sorted by community (some arbitrary amount is pulled), then requested order (new, hot etc) and it takes ages to load so it’s probably not very threaded. Regardless, this looks promising and I’ll keep my eye on it - thanks!

Back in the day, like many people then, I had a couple of different accounts across multiple messaging platforms. 2 domestic ones, couple of international ones. It was a fun mess but people were tired of running multiple apps and so loads of multi-protocol apps were developed.

Usually messaging protocols were simply reverse engineered and some apps also used plug-ins so that niche protocols could be added by community. Some also did gateways that translated proprietary protocols to XMPP.

By the end of that era many platforms opened themselves up with XMPP. It was nice because most of those multi-protocol apps didn’t have to support as many different platforms explicitly.

But that’s about it. I had a Google Talk account too and found it cute that I can use it to add my friends on other platforms. I was a nerdbut barely knew any other people that were utilizing it. Realistically it didn’t make any difference because you still had to use multi-protocol app for the ones that didn’t open.

Soon platforms that were never on or barely on XMPP started to take over. Messenger was the biggest in my country and it was always a PITA on third party apps.

Google Talk doing a rug pull on XMPP didn’t to anything meaningful to XMPP itself. It was never that big and simply remains a niche to this day.

I too get an impression that a single article on XMPP Gtalk drama made round on Fediverse that many made their opinion solely on it.