Fediverse

You're talking about XMPP, and it was google with google chat that people refer to with it.

That said, there's a lot of details that story people throw around about google killing it that lacks some details. Specifically that the premier service that used and developed the standard, jabber, was acquired by cisco like 8 years before google supposedly killed it, which i would argue affected it far harder than google chat did.

It's also lacking a lot of modern features that were becoming staple around the time that it was killed; i.e. QoS, assured delivery, read receipts, and a few other things. I still don't think the protocol supports them.

Also, the protocol still exists and is used. It's used by microsoft in skype for business, it's also the IM protocol for lots of gaming platforms like origin, playstation, the switch (for its push notifications for their online service), League of legends, fortnite, and others. It's still a reasonably popular standard when it comes to chat programs, though none of them that i'm aware of use the actual federation piece of it to talk to each other.

While the tactic alluded to does exist ("embrace, extend, extinguish"), i've never been necessarily convinced that google "kiled" xmpp, as its been around a long time and continues to be for various reasons. Even with google chat, it was never a 'front end' thing many users even thought about, because it's back end frameworks tech, and it continues to be so in lots of different places today. I'm reasonably sure that the people who get upset about it and proclaim google killed it are basically just upset that it didn't become the defacto chat standard today, which i would argue almost nothing is the defacto standard anyways, unless you count discord which kinda came out of nowhere like a whirlwind and took over the chat space and has nothing to do with any XMPP drama.

Ultimately, its up to you (whoever is reading this) to look into the facts of the matter and decide for yourself if that's what really happened, but keep in mind, the people who usually repeat the anecdote about how google killed it have an agenda to push. I'm personally skeptical, because there's reasons for google to have dropped it (see mentioned limitations above), and even back then, it wasn't that outrageously popular. In fact, i would argue its more widely used today than it was back then, but i have no hard numbers on that.