I wouldn't mind if they federated with Matrix. In fact that would be great. I would mind if they try to control it. Which inevitably happens when a major player invests into a FOSS project on a big scale. They'll start to worm themselves into steering groups and then use that influence to get some return on investment and start steering things towards their goals. In Google's case that would mean lock-in and datamining (and ads but I doubt that would ever fly on Matrix)

And indeed like zaik said below, they used to do XMPP and stopped it. XMPP is pretty good too these days by the way. But I prefer Matrix because of its bridges.

XMPP has many bridges. I'm using my XMPP account to talk without issues with my Telegram, Discord and IRC contacts :)

Ha yes, reminds me of this quote from "100 years of whatever this will be" (recommended read) that trended on HN [1] yesterday:

> Software intercompatibility is trending toward zero. Text chat apps are literally the easiest thing in the world to imagine making compatible - they just send very short strings, very rarely, to very small networks of people! But I use at least 7 separate ones because every vendor wants their own stupid castle and won't share. Don't even get me started about books or video.

[0] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211201

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29416606

Google used to provide an XMPP (IETF Internet Standard for IM) service to all its users once.

Once, when they still thought that competition is a good thing.

Now that they are dominating several areas they think monopoly is great and open interfaces bad.

Facebook messenger is also XMPP!

It's just not federated, just like Gab 2.0 :-)

as long as it would follow the spec instead of EEE

To clarify, do you mean embrace, extend, extinguish?