Re: What about XMPP?
By: poindexter FORTRAN to All on Tue Feb 17 2026 06:55 am
Everyone's talking about the fediverse using ActivityPub, creating discord servers and using other services.
Heh, I thought the discourse at the moment was moving away from discord due to their new age verification processes and their ties to... Palantir, is it? Regardless, some aren't happy and are looking to find alternatives.
It seems like XMPP (the protocol formerly known as Jabber) is starting to get attention again. I liked Jabber, we used it for internal comms back in the 2000s. It's TLS-friendly, supports groups and file transfers, and ties into *nix security (or not, if you want to run it as a standalone...)
I'm very glad that it never went away - but the thought that it would have or even possibly did showed what I've come to better understand lately - that XMPP is all over the place, we just don't realise it. Companies have based their chat products on XMPP for seemingly forever, and XMPP being eXtensible, it's apparently embedded in all sorts of things.
I've dragged my immediate family through xmpp, snikket (xmpp but was supposed to be 'slick'), Matrix, Delta, and am now just about entirely back to XMPP. It's driven my wife a little nuts, so have really been taking my time going back to XMPP.
The thing is - a few XMPP apps have really got better over the past several years, including newcomers like Cheogram. Monal on IOS seems to be pretty solid. Desktop apps are probably the weakest clients at the moment, but hopefully XMPP does have a bit of resurgence and some funding gets made available for groups to really push forward with.
Most of these apps do opportunistic encryption on 1:1 chats automatically, so E2E is there, though if that's one's only or biggest concern, one either pays strict attention to that or uses something like Matrix. (On this note, it's astounding in the present day there's so many Signal cheerleaders - Signal requires your phone # and is centralized US tech. Not recommendable.)
XMPP being everywhere is interesting - apparently Matrix is or was using jitsi as a tie-in for video chat... and jitsi's back-end is... XMPP. I recently discovered XMPP is built-in to Homeassistant, so getting notifications or other messages out of HA was trivial to get going.
It seems like a nice, lightweight app that would fit in with tildes and small groups while still allowing federation with other sites.
I had prosody running on a home server due to a jitsi install, so that's what I built upon to get things rolling for a family chat system again, and it's been great. Lightweight and capable.
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