Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please prove me wrong, but self-hosting an XMPP server isn't something you can just install and have it work, if your definition includes all the XEPs that you actually end up needing and chat working at a level of user friendliness people expect these days. I spent over 2 days learning what was out there and installing Prosody myself, followed by giving up and hiring a guy with experience to do it for me, and it too…
> self-hosting an XMPP server isn't something you can just install and have it work For basic needs ala IRC it should just work out of the box by defining a virtualhost. For respect of advanced features as defined in the XMPP Compliance Suites, it'll need a few more settings but there's good guides: prosody: https://homebrewserver.club/configuring-a-modern-xmpp-server... ejabberd: https://www.process-one.net/blog/eja…
Everything here sounds to me like "with a year or two of improvements, non-technical users might not run away screaming". I would love to use a federated chat protocol, but the reality is that XMPP isn't in the same league as other chat programs right now from a feature perspective, ease of installation, client availability, or user friendliness standpoint.
My company tried it, hard, for about 3 weeks. I paid something like $2000 in consultant and employee time to do that test. I was willing to deal with it because it was literally the only option in our case (we needed to avoid google push notifications). Once we realized we could make Zulip work by routing push notifications through a separate service we switched and almost everything about Zulip works smoother and with more useful features. None of these replies are convincing me that XMPP would work any better if I just knew more about how to install it right, etc. Again, I would love to use an open, federated chat protocol, but XMPP isn't useful right now in the ways I need it to be.