Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

(gultsch.de)

56 points | by inputmice 2 hours ago

11 comments

  • fishgoesblub 40 minutes 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 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
      I had amsn when msn and yahoo messenger were the place everybody I knew was at.
  • dewey 2 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 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
        Yeah, I use it as a messenger for my wife and I.
    • svyatoslavpavl 1 hour ago
      Jitsi Meet still runs on XMPP, Prosody handles the signaling. WhatsApp also started life as a patched ejabberd.
      • iamcalledrob 16 minutes ago
        WhatsApp is still based on XMPP unless things have changed a lot recently.
  • 1970-01-01 51 minutes 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!
  • delduca 1 hour ago
    I think Android still uses XMPP to delivery push notifications under the hood
    • inputmice 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 51 minutes 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 49 minutes ago
      • writtenone 46 minutes 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 23 minutes 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 36 minutes 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 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
    Its biggest issue is adoption because it's very solid otherwise and even supports stuff like screen sharing.
  • zeafoamrun 1 hour ago
    And I haven't used XMPP for about 20 of them (sadly)
    • giancarlostoro 1 hour 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 4 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 1 hour 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.
  • Flowdalic 1 hour ago
    [flagged]