Top
Best
New

Posted by inputmice 6 hours ago

Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence(gultsch.de)
131 points | 50 comments
fishgoesblub 4 hours 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

PunchyHamster 53 minutes ago|
It makes sense. It's old, crufty mix of extensions, which nobody actually wants to be that modular for a chat client, because that just gets you into mess of what server/client supports
zaik 32 minutes ago|||
> mess of what server/client supports

If you allow for independent implementations of the protocol this will always happen. Also, inventing another non-standard protocol creates even more incompatibility between clients and servers.

akho 24 minutes ago|||
Matrix is in the same place wrt feature mismatches. It's a quality of the problem, not of the solution. I actually think XMPP does a better, more structured job here.
Daunk 3 minutes ago||
XMPP always seemed great, buy I have yet to find a client that can replace Telegram's client on both desktop and mobile.
delduca 4 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
zerozerotwo 1 hour ago||
This used to be one of the biggest Mac open source projects. I remember they demoed project builder (before Xcode) compiling it
exe34 4 hours ago||
I had amsn when msn and yahoo messenger were the place everybody I knew was at.
d3Xt3r 1 hour ago||
I was on Miranda. It was tiny and portable (unlike Trillian) and could connect to pretty much every popular messaging service, including IRC. And in spite of being able to connect to everything, it used far lesser memory than even just a single instance of MSN and Yahoo. It was one of my go-to apps that I'd install on a freshly formatted PC back in the day.
colechristensen 58 seconds ago||
My first task at my first real tech job was setting up an ejabberd server
abound 2 hours ago||
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.
dewey 5 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 5 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 5 hours ago||
Yeah, I use it as a messenger for my wife and I.
svyatoslavpavl 5 hours ago||
Jitsi Meet still runs on XMPP, Prosody handles the signaling. WhatsApp also started life as a patched ejabberd.
iamcalledrob 3 hours ago||
WhatsApp is still based on XMPP unless things have changed a lot recently.
tensor 57 minutes ago|||
What about their signal integration? https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/
alex1138 1 hour ago|||
I don't consider WA a product. I don't consider it a viable product. Post-2014/Zuckerberg. Who cares if it's XMPP, it didn't federate
1970-01-01 4 hours 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 3 hours 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 3 hours 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.
grumbel 2 hours ago||
And how am I going to find the valid friend requests under the hundreds of spam ones? I used it just like a chat version of public email, for bug reports and such, so I don't know who is going to message me beforehand.
fluoridation 2 hours ago||
Fair enough. I've only ever used XMPP when Google chat used it and at work in the days before Slack.
daneel_w 2 hours ago|||
I think that's a symptom of the provider you chose, not the XMPP sphere itself. I've used Jabber/XMPP for just over 15 years and while I've seen plenty of bullshit going on in various highly popular MUCs (join-floods, phishing attempts and such) I've never personally been subjected to spam directed at me.
tcfhgj 2 hours ago||
I have joined XMPP rooms via Matrix and have already gotten spam from XMPP this way
zaik 28 minutes ago||
Which is surprising since XMPP allows you to hide your global address in public rooms and Matrix doesn't (unless they fixed it by now?).
delduca 4 hours ago||
I think Android still uses XMPP to delivery push notifications under the hood
inputmice 4 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

daneel_w 2 hours ago||
Unless I'm mistaken, Apple's push notifications network ("APN") and a few other macOS/iOS under-the-hood things are also built on top of XMPP.
basilgohar 3 hours 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!

tolerance 3 hours 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.
More comments...