>> Diane Trout:

“@jankusanagi@datamost.com I haven't managed to figure out how to subscribe to someone over Google's s2s connection since they deprecated it. But people I subscribed to prior to the spam waves still work. They didn't remove it must made it really hard to use”

Well, first they'd need to be using their account from a standard XMPP client, or set GMail's web interface chat to "Classic" or "Old" or whatever's called.

Bonus points if the person doing that gives them feedback to going back to """old chat""" such as "I want XMPP federation, not Hangouts silo" ;)

Secondly, as you probably know, your server would need to have very lax encryption settings. I don't recall the exact name of the things, but something that most XMPP servers agreed to require back in 2014 or so, that GMail, of coooourse, doesn't.

So yes, Google made it quite hard to use. I wonder why they didn't just kill it completely...