Ask HN: XMPP/Jabber self hosting

There's really no good way around this for iOS - it's really a limitation of how push notifications work vs. how XMPP is designed. You'll find that things like IRC clients have the exact same problems on iOS (similar problem space, similar protocol that expects constant connections).

If you want to do this for real, what you end up doing is implementing your own server backend that receives XMPP messages and then sends out push notifications to a mobile client. Generally a pain in the rear, but do-able. Getting your own iOS developer key & dealing with app store approval for stuff like this is probably the hardest part (for shops that aren't already doing mobile development). There are 3rd-party services that help bridge this gap: examples are https://pushover.net/ or https://boxcar.io/

If you're okay with a hosted solution and don't really want to deal with development or deploying a XMPP solution yourself, many of our clients have had good success with Slack (https://slack.com/)

A Ruby implementation called Vines [0] [1] might be interesting to try out.

[0] http://www.getvines.org/ [1] https://github.com/negativecode/vines

And how do you solve the problem of reliably delivering messages over XMPP?

For ex, if I switch from 3G to Wifi on my mobile (or just loose connectivity) the server still thinks I'm online and will send messages over the TCP socket (that hasn't timeouted yet).

I've been thinking about hosting my own XMPP server as well. Does anyone have any recommendations on the most cost-effective place to host it? Since it's for a small group of friends I'd imagine it wouldn't need anything too resource intensive. Perhaps something like Linode or DO?