What we have here is failure to communicate
I run my own jabber server. I've done it for a couple of months now, since fastmail.fm proved themselves incompetent at providing a service with steady connections. I had moved there from gmail. Why I left gmail should be more than obvious by now.
As I write this, people who rely on Google for Jabber/XMPP service are twisting in the wind, unable to get messages through. Those of us on other servers are doing just fine overall, but are being hammered by 5xx errors upon trying to send messages to those back in the "Goo"lag.
It's just not a big deal to run your own server if you have your own domain name and a place to park such a thing. You don't even need much in the way of resources. Right now, just to host my own connections, it looks like it's consuming less than 20 MB of physical memory (RSS) total. Yes, that's megabytes. In terms of CPU time, it's so low as to be lost in the noise.
The freedom it gives, however, is priceless.