At the risk of sounding like an unhinged fanboy: XMPP is pretty awesome! I’ve been involved in one way or another with XMPP, the network protocol that is an open standard for messaging and presence, for the last two decades. Much of that revolves around development of Openfire, our XMPP-based real-time communications server. TL;DR: I built a thing: https://xmppnetwork.goodbytes.im XMPP is pretty awesome (as stated above)! Openfire is a great development platform! Decentralisation with XM...

Sorry if this isn’t the right venue for that, I thought it’d be in the tone of “self-hosting” and “federation” :)

tl;dr: some XMPP servers started to deploy a mod to report back about how they federate with the rest of the network, and now there is a pretty graph to show for it at https://xmppnetwork.goodbytes.im/webgl.html

  • @[email protected]English
    4•11 months ago

    I’ve used Matrix for months and agree with most points. I would like to try XMPP but it is clear that it does not have the best onboarding experience.

    The problem I’ve observed with XMPP as an outsider is the lack of a standard. Each server or client has its own supported features and I’m not sure which one to choose.

    Which client would you recommend?

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      6•11 months ago

      The problem I’ve observed with XMPP as an outsider is the lack of a standard. Each server or client has its own supported features and I’m not sure which one to choose.

      That’s a valid concern, but I wouldn’t call it a problem. There are practically 2 types of clients/servers: the ones which are maintained, and which work absolutely fine and well together, and the rest, the unmaintained/abandoned part of the ecosystem.

      And with the protocol being so stable and backwards/forwards compatible in large parts, those unmaintained clients will just work, just not with the latest and greatest features (XMPP has the machinery to let clients and servers advertise about their supported features so the experience is at least cohesive).

      Which client would you recommend?

      Depends on which platform you are on and the type of usage. You should be able to pick one as advertised on https://joinjabber.org , that should keep you away from the fringe/unmaintained stuff. Personally I use gajim and monocles.