XMPP at 25: The Open Standard That Refuses to Die
Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence
As Europe scrambles for digital sovereignty, the author argues that true independence requires open standards, not just open-source code. XMPP, the 25-year-old messaging protocol, is held up as the ideal: a community-governed standard with multiple independent implementations, unlike walled gardens like Signal or single-vendor platforms like Matrix. The article traces XMPP's evolution, its extensions for mobile and encryption, and its quiet resilience, positioning it as the infrastructure we should have been using all along.
The standard for instant messaging—RFC 6120: Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).
- fishgoesblub
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/
- delduca
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
- krisgenre
In 2009, I worked for a company that was developing a modified version of Ignite Realtime's Spark IM client and I have vague memory of sending messages to Gtalk from it. Because of Google's support, XMPP was all the craze back then.
It's great to see that Openfire (Ignite Realtime's XMPP server) has had a release even last week! https://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/
- pavo-etc
I have recently picked up XMPP as my agent communication layer, and its worked great. Each pi agent is given an account and wrapped in an XMPP client[0] that lets it speak to me and other agents when needed.
This has worked well since I can spin up new accounts on demand and I can use existing server software (ejabberd, perfect) and clients (Fluux, great; Conversations, okay). I've had to make a few custom modifications to each client to make agent comms a bit nicer (e.g. exposing status messages more prominently since I use that to expose current agent commands), but the XMPP layer has had pretty much everything I could have wanted.
Controlling a chat service is a bit intoxicating, I'm now using it as my notification service over a bunch of different projects.
I used Google Chat way back, its nice that the tech is still around and great as ever.
- abound
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.
- dewey
> 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?
- grumbel
Looking at my complete grey friends list in Pidgin, with not a single user left active, it looks like every left around 8-12 years ago. Many of the old servers are offline as well.
- 1970-01-01
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!