XMPP is truly decentralized with no single point that collects this kind of data. There have been some attempts over the years, but they always failed to capture more than a fraction of the network. A recent one is more artistic in nature, probably realizing the futility of it.
The popular Conversations app has sold 100k+ units on the PlayStore, but since you can also legally get it for free, that is probably only part of the actual users.
tal@olio.cafe 1 day ago
I haven’t been using instant messaging programs much for some years, but checking https://old.reddit.com/r/xmpp/ I see:
https://www.glukhov.org/post/2025/09/xmpp-jabber-userbase-and-popularity/
This has an estimate of 13–20 million users globally for 2023, but warns that because many servers don’t publish information about their userbase, there’s necessarily uncertainty. According to it, Germany is the country with the largest userbase, followed by Russia, followed by the US.