XMPP has changed yes. And we now have some nice clients that are compatible together and stable servers with a bunch of nice features (multi-devices sync, history management, ACK, rich messages, messages edition, encryption, battery management, push notifications…).

I'm personally working on Movim, a nice-looking "Social-IM" client fully based on XMPP (https://movim.eu/). The main goal of the project is to show that we have now all the tools to build a decentralized, standard and universal IM (and also social !) network without reinventing the wheel again and again.

You can have a look at our latest release-note as well https://pod.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim/f5f883e3122... (this blog post has been published/edited using Movim and XMPP ;)).

And Movim is also compatible with Spectrum to offer interconnection with other networks ;)