Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence
136 points - today at 3:51 PM
Sourcefishgoesblub
today at 6:02 PM
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
today at 9:16 PM
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
vcccgjuf
today at 10:19 PM
Matrix is nearly as old today as XMPP was when the Matrix project was started, and Matrix is still such a pile of shit standard that there's STILL only one server implementation and one client. That's actually not how the standard was designed; if Matrix had been a successful project, according to their own goals, the ecosystem would look a lot more like XMPP than it does.
Comparing XMPP at 11 years old to Matrix today makes it abundantly clear that the main thing Element LLC does is waste European public grant funds
> 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.
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.
neilalexander
today at 10:20 PM
XMPP leans heavily on capability negotiation and service discovery which makes it straightforward to degrade gracefully when feature mismatches occur. Matrix is significantly lacking in this regard.
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
today at 9:04 PM
This used to be one of the biggest Mac open source projects. I remember they demoed project builder (before Xcode) compiling it
I had amsn when msn and yahoo messenger were the place everybody I knew was at.
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.
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.
XMPP always seemed great, buy I have yet to find a client that can replace Telegram's client on both desktop and mobile.
> 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
today at 4:44 PM
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
Yeah, I use it as a messenger for my wife and I.
svyatoslavpavl
today at 4:58 PM
Jitsi Meet still runs on XMPP, Prosody handles the signaling. WhatsApp also started life as a patched ejabberd.
iamcalledrob
today at 6:26 PM
WhatsApp is still based on XMPP unless things have changed a lot recently.
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
today at 5:50 PM
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!
> 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
today at 7:10 PM
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.
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.
You can mediate friends requests by having servers generate an invite link, you can generate QR codes your friend can scan on a side channel, ... There are ways
fluoridation
today at 8:09 PM
Fair enough. I've only ever used XMPP when Google chat used it and at work in the days before Slack.
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.
I have joined XMPP rooms via Matrix and have already gotten spam from XMPP this way
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?).
> XMPP is the pinnacle of chat that just works.
No. It doesn't "just work". It very much depends on which subset of the XEPs all the parties in the chain support.
> All other popular systems and servers went defunct;
Well, in this sense it does just work :)
I think Android still uses XMPP to delivery push notifications under the hood
inputmice
today at 5:22 PM
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
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
today at 6:47 PM
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
today at 7:08 PM
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.
colechristensen
today at 10:09 PM
My first task at my first real tech job was setting up an ejabberd server
telesilla
today at 5:24 PM
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.
kogasa240p
today at 4:53 PM
Its biggest issue is adoption because it's very solid otherwise and even supports stuff like screen sharing.
screensharing is ubiquitous at this point
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.
writtenone
today at 5:51 PM
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
today at 5:53 PM
https://dino.im/
writtenone
today at 5:56 PM
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
today at 6:18 PM
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
today at 6:06 PM
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.
Crashes?!? I've been using Conversations for a long time and can't remember any crashes. Something must be wrong with your setup.
For me, the bigger problem is that I was unable to get OMEMO + Apple Clients working properly. I think OMEMO 1 has some design flaws and hope that OMEMO 2 will fix those.
zeafoamrun
today at 5:09 PM
And I haven't used XMPP for about 20 of them (sadly)
giancarlostoro
today at 5:11 PM
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.
zeafoamrun
today at 5:35 PM
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.
giancarlostoro
today at 7:58 PM
That's fair, no worries.
seba_dos1
today at 6:38 PM
Google Talk - and it was an actual federating XMPP server, in contrast to Facebook which merely allowed you to login with an XMPP client.
giancarlostoro
today at 8:00 PM
There was a point where Google and Facebook supported external clients, and then within the same year both Google and Facebook closed up to any external clients, then ultimately ditching XMPP.
25 years of independence and, dare I say, irrelevance.
unethical_ban
today at 8:34 PM
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.
Flowdalic
today at 4:49 PM
[flagged]
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)