Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

I love XMPP and am hopeful for its future with what the teams behind Movim[0], and Fluux[1] are doing. It was a tremendous shame that Matrix didn't improve upon XMPP and instead did their own thing. I continuously wonder what would the XMPP ecosystem look like, if the millions of dollars of funding Matrix initially had (what a waste) went to XMPP instead?

[0]: https://movim.eu/

[1]: https://github.com/processone/fluux-messenger

It was so cool when facebook, google and others used to use xmpp, at that time I used a single IM client https://adium.im

XMPP always seemed great, buy I have yet to find a client that can replace Telegram's client on both desktop and mobile.

I recently migrated from Google Voice to jmp.chat, which is a telephony/SMS/etc bridge to XMPP. I use Dino on my laptop, and Cheogram on my phone, and the experience has been quite nice and seamless. Next step is to host my own Prosody server and import my whole Google Voice history.

> Matrix reinvented the wheel as a rubber-tyred metro. On paper, it provides real benefits, such as climbing steeper inclines, which are then used to aggressively advertise and lobby local governments to buy in. But in the end, the municipality gets locked into a single vendor.

I stumble upon Matrix from time to time, but Jabber I haven't really seen anywhere in the past decade after my internet friends moved to IRC. Are there any bigger communities still using it? Back in the days Facebook Messenger was backed by it, so maybe there's still some bigger entity using it as a backbone for something?

XMPP is the pinnacle of chat that just works. And it is champion by default, which is kind of the point here. All other popular systems and servers went defunct; it will never be taken over by BigCo and left to rot. Here's to 25 more years!

I think Android still uses XMPP to delivery push notifications under the hood

My first task at my first real tech job was setting up an ejabberd server

I loved using XMPP and used to run my own server and even had the apps that would send notifications from my phone for different events over XMPP (forgot the name at the moment).

I'm all-in on Matrix right now and use it for my family but it's a far cry from the usability that XMPP had. I am still hopeful that Matrix can live up to its promises but perhaps XMPP will always be around if that doesn't work out. Who knows!

I had a good technical experience using XMPP once but the community I found using it was an obscure one and I haven't come across another instance of others using it since. No matter how useful a tool is the main hurdle is adoption. This sort of retrospective is useful from an advocacy point of view.

Google & XMPP standards foundation develop the very useful Jingle XEP, so XMPP is linked to the history of Google Voice and whatever Google Talk/Chat turned into, maybe somehow inspiring Google Meet? Jingle was also inspirational to WebRTC signalling.

Its biggest issue is adoption because it's very solid otherwise and even supports stuff like screen sharing.

i set up a xmpp server a few weeks ago for agent orchestration and agent to human workflows. hadn't inatalled ejabberd in a very long time but feeling right at home.

Are there any XMPP clients with the UX and privacy of Signal?

All of them seem to look like they're from the 00s!

And I haven't used XMPP for about 20 of them (sadly)

I think of Matrix as a protocol + client/server suite; an open standard with official software backing it and a number of parallel implementations. When I wanted to stand up an independent server that could do most of what Discord does for communities, Matrix was the easy find. Encrypted chat, e2e support, and encrypted voice and video chat rooms with screen share.

I admit I didn't research "XMPP-based discord alternative" but maybe that says something about the ecosystem's health.

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If only they had avoided XML. XML drove away a lot of people who would otherwise have been interested early on.

(I once found myself in the same meeting as two of the people who made the mistakes that meant you couldn’t just pipe stuff through an XML parser and hope it worked. I tend to speak my mind)