Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence • Hacker News Board

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#41

Post by arendtio » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 8:17 PM UTC

writtenone wrote: post #20

pantalaimon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://dino.im/

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.

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.

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#42

Post by unethical_ban » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 8:34 PM UTC

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.

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#43

Post by alex1138 » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 8:50 PM UTC

iamcalledrob wrote: post #24

svyatoslavpavl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#44

Post by zerozerotwo » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 9:04 PM UTC

delduca wrote: post #10

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

This used to be one of the biggest Mac open source projects. I remember they demoed project builder (before Xcode) compiling it

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#45

Post by tensor » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 9:12 PM UTC

iamcalledrob wrote: post #24

svyatoslavpavl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

What about their signal integration? https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#46

Post by PunchyHamster » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 9:16 PM UTC

fishgoesblub wrote: post #21

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/fluu…

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

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#47

Post by esafak » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

zeafoamrun wrote: post #9

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

25 years of independence and, dare I say, irrelevance.

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#48

Post by zaik » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 9:37 PM UTC

PunchyHamster wrote: post #46

fishgoesblub wrote: post #21

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/fluu…

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

> 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.

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#49

Post by zaik » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 9:42 PM UTC

tcfhgj wrote: post #38

daneel_w wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?).

Re: Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

#50

Post by akho » Mon, Aug 24, 2026, 9:45 PM UTC

PunchyHamster wrote: post #46

fishgoesblub wrote: post #21

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/fluu…

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

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.