Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

iinputmice about 3 hours ago 28 commentsRead Article on gultsch.de

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Discussion (28 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

tolerance•6 minutes ago

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.

fishgoesblub•about 1 hour ago

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

delduca•about 2 hours ago

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

exe34•about 2 hours ago

I had amsn when msn and yahoo messenger were the place everybody I knew was at.

dewey•about 3 hours ago

> 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?

inputmice•about 3 hours ago

XMPP these days often gets used as a friends-and-family style messenger (Think WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal replacement) rather than something communities would use (Discord/IRC). A lot of users of XMPP are also out of the public eye. NATO, police forces and intelligence agencies use it. The community style channels are supported though and a search engine for them can be found here: https://search.jabber.network/channels/1

Semaphor•about 2 hours ago

Yeah, I use it as a messenger for my wife and I.

svyatoslavpavl•about 2 hours ago

Jitsi Meet still runs on XMPP, Prosody handles the signaling. WhatsApp also started life as a patched ejabberd.

iamcalledrob•about 1 hour ago

WhatsApp is still based on XMPP unless things have changed a lot recently.

basilgohar•27 minutes ago

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!

bborud•25 minutes ago

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)

1970-01-01•about 1 hour ago

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!

grumbel•10 minutes ago

> XMPP is the pinnacle of chat that just works.

Not my experience. I had to give up on it since it was just completely flooded with spam, and unlike mail readers that have ways to mitigate it, XMPP clients were ill prepared. Might still work if you keep your address hidden, but as chat-like alternative to a public email it just stopped working years ago.

fluoridation•5 minutes ago

What do you mean? You have to accept a friend request before someone can message you. It's more spam-resistant than email, not less. That said, I don't know if there's anything that prevents spamming friend requests.

delduca•about 2 hours ago

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

inputmice•about 2 hours ago

Indeed. And on a Google-free Android phone the XMPP client Conversations can utilize its existing, permanent XMPP connection to deliver push notifications to other (mostly open-source) apps using an alternative to Google push (FCM) called UnifiedPush.

There was a talk at FOSDEM about that.

https://gultsch.video/w/gRGZqKKvNBvvMesyWNQzoK

telesilla•about 2 hours ago

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.

writtenone•about 1 hour ago

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

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

pantalaimon•about 1 hour ago

https://dino.im/

writtenone•about 1 hour ago

Thanks! Any good Android clients? "Conversations" seems to be the best and it's nowhere near the polish of Signal & Co. crashes often, UX is clunky, family will never stick with it.

4chandaily•about 1 hour ago

As a counterpoint, I use conversations literally every day, and cannot recall the last time it crashed. My partner and kids have used it for at least the last 7 or 8 years to communicate with me and each other. I don't claim there are no issues, but "crashes often" isn't something I would expect to hear about it.

I don't find the UX to be clunky either, but I acknowledge that could just be my familiarity with the program, so I would leave that for others to dispute.

fishgoesblub•about 1 hour ago

What makes you think that? I haven't experienced, or heard of people having frequent crashes. Me and my family also use it to communicate to each other with no issues regarding the UI.

lnz_me•about 2 hours ago

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.

kogasa240p•about 2 hours ago

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

zeafoamrun•about 2 hours ago

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

giancarlostoro•about 2 hours ago

There was a time where both Google Chat (whatever it was called back then I lost track) and Facebook Chat were built on it. So you might have.

seba_dos1•37 minutes ago

Google Talk - and it was an actual federating XMPP server, in contrast to Facebook which merely allowed you to login with an XMPP client.

zeafoamrun•about 2 hours ago

You're right. I know at least one company used XMPP for things like customer support chat too. So maybe I have. I just mean the last time I used it intentionally was a long time ago before I was worn down futilely trying to convince friends to use it instead of locked down chat apps.