Morning all,

I'm trying to look at my options for one-on-one text chat with a handful of friends. In the good old days we used MSN, then when that disappeared we moved to Google Talk, which was perfectly fine for text chat. It was documented and there were plenty of client apps for it... then Google replaced it with Hangouts. This was never documented and the reverse-engineered third-party client that I use is a bit buggy... and now the cycle continues with Google Chat, which also doesn't look like it's going to be documented.

Enough is enough and I want to move to something that's not at a company's 'shutdown whims'. Is XMPP (an open standard) the best choice there? Or is there a better solution? There seem to be plenty of XMPP clients and I'm also spoiled for choice with XMPP providers... which leads to my next question. Any suggestions on a good provider? The client I installed suggested yax.im, but it seems to be very unreliable. Does anyone have any experience with the various providers and have any tips?

Or am I barking up the wrong tree and am I likely to be better off with a different system? We just need support for text and the odd image.