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.
People half-joke that coming to Fediverse is easy, all you need to do is select a provider like you do with e-mail.
In case of Lemmy this omits the part where you have to block dozens of communities because they shill for genocidal regimes and you can’t block them and their users wholesale using instances. You also have to be on a lookout for trolls that coordinate on those instances and use alts from other instances. If you aren’t careful enough your experience might be akin to a conspiracy Facebook group but obviously it’s users fault.
Mastodon doesn’t have this issue despite using same Activity Pub framework.
Kbin doesn’t have it.
It’s Lemmy developers and instances that somehow ended up with staggering amount of tankie trolls, to the extent that exceeds even alt-right trolls on Reddit.
Telling people to start their own instances is acknowledging that the issue is so widespread that there are no instances with sane policies.