> Most of my contacts made the switch, and I’m now at roughly 95% Signal for day-to-day conversations

Years ago, I set up a Matrix server. I got some people to migrate, but ultimately even my husband stopped using it because the UI and accessibility of all the applications was so poor (and he has very bad eyesight, so this was a dealbreaker)

Looking for another alternative, I ended up with Telegram. It was pretty open, easy to work with, had great UI and even a ton of funny stickers and emojis, so I got nearly all my friends to migrate. I did NOT go for Signal because I do not need end-to-end encryption all the time, and having all the same conversations available on my desktop as well as on my phone was important, and still is. Unfortunately, it's also run by a severe weirdo.

So yeah, I'm not really sure what to use now.

Hosting chat infrastructure is surprisingly hard, but the real challenges emerge beyond C10K+ scale.

So self-hosting federated instances like this is pretty interesting way to scale.

If the premise contributing to the conclusion to run their own chat service is:

> But Signal is still one company running one service. If they shut down tomorrow or change direction, I’m back to square one.

Aren't they in the same boat now with Cloudflare and Let's Encrypt?

I've been hosting a ejabberd instance for a few people for almost a decade now. It just works, takes close to no resources and needs almost no maintenance - just some trivial config checkups when migrating to newer major releases.

Around the same time I tried hosting a Matrix server with Synapse, but quickly stopped. It consumed a lot of resources when doing almost nothing, and it stopped running after an upgrade with some non-obvious error message, so instead of reanimating it I just abandoned it and moved to matrix.org with my personal account.

I ran ejabberd, later prosody for a while. Eventually I stopped because the contacts went away and it was just not easy enough to set up for ordinary people.

Sad because the idea of running a federated chat service for your family and them having all their contacts there, is great from a data ownership point of view.

Went back to use a mix of WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and Messenger because apparently there is always some people not wanting to use one or the other service, or only using one of them.

Google Talk and Facebook Messenger both used to be XMPP, and I used Pidgin for both, wonderful times...

I’ve been running a matrix server for about 2 years for family. It’s… ok. Clients are bad. Right now nobody on iOS can send images because there is a bug in fluffychat preventing it. Kinda defeats the purpose of a chat for sharing baby pictures. Synapse is a beast. It’s basically taken over my entire VPS.

Joining rooms of various FOSS projects has been nice, but honestly I wish they’d all just stick to libera.chat

This article makes me wonder why we collectively ditched xmpp for matrix when it seems like the protocol is still miles ahead?

Give me linux-> mobile voice call and linux-> Linux screen share and I would be happy.

Also plugin for gif selector.

But other than that, my ejabberd instance has been running for years with no effort.

I've run an XMPP server in various states of professionalism for around 20 years now. From mom's basement all the way to a colocated server with a similar setup that's described in the post.

The only caveat I have not been able to solve is hosting an xmpp server for a different domain, like it's possible with email.

A client connecting the account joe.doe@example.ORG will find the server it wants to connect to via SRV to be , e.g., xmpp14.example.COM and expect a TLS certificate for "example.ORG" which that server does not have (nor can/should easily get) - which makes sense in a lot of ways, but limits the ways one can offer hosting services.

If anyone has creative solutions I'm all ears.

  _xmpp-client._tcp.domain.tld. TTL IN SRV priority weight port target
  _xmpps-client._tcp.domain.tld. TTL IN SRV priority weight port target

  example:
  _xmpp-client._tcp.not-my-domain.com. 3599 IN SRV 5 0 5222 jabber.my-domain.com.

  > The receiving entity SHOULD choose which certificate to present
  > based on the domainpart contained in the 'to' attribute of the
  > initial stream header (in essence, this domainpart is
  > functionally equivalent to the Server Name Indication defined for
  > TLS in [TLS-EXT]).

  > Once the identity of the stream peer has been validated, the
  > validating entity SHOULD also correlate the validated identity with
  > the 'from' address (if any) of the stream header it received from the
  > peer.  If the two identities do not match, the validating entity
  > SHOULD terminate the connection attempt (however, there might be good
  > reasons why the identities do not match, as described under
  > Section 4.7.1).

Snikket ( https://snikket.org/ ) is an easier way to self-host an XMPP server. It's a pre-configured Prosody server in a docker image, and you can use it with any XMPP client you like.

> I still use Signal for most day-to-day conversations and I’m not planning to stop.

You can run a Signal-XMPP gateway. See https://slidge.im/

This will allow you to use your Signal account from your XMPP client. Bridging audio / video calls isn't currently possible. But most other feature work across the gateway.

Buried here is the fact that Gajim seems to have had big updates lately. I might just switch back to XMPP from Matrix, as all the matrix clients on Linux suck frankly. Conversations on Android is significantly better than any Matrix client I've used.

I don’t know. The only good solution would be if all messaging apps used the same protocol so everyone could be reached. But right now it is a mess. We can’t even message each other easily. It’s ridiculous. But what am I talking about? We can’t even agree on the same measurement units.

XMPP has been great to run on NixOS… the servers uses so few resources compared to something extremely heavy like Matrix. The Movim client has been wonderful too allowing users to have calls/sharing from chatrooms (MUCs)—supporting a pretty new XEP in the XMPP space—which means there’s no good reason to be on Discord anymore if you care about the freedom/privacy of yourself & your communities.

> OMEMO is built on the same encryption that Signal uses, so I’m comfortable trusting it.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't trust OMEMO (we all have our own threat models), but OMEMO and Signal have fewer similarities that people often assume and has some important caveats [0].

[0] https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/

I went all in on xmpp to replace my traditional cell communications (text and calls) about a year ago, using Snikket on a VPS for the server, jmp.chat for an phone->xmpp gateway service, and a data-only esim for connectivity.

From my experience the biggest pain point gets the least amount of discussion in this post and that is the client landscape. I'm on iOS so I tried Monal and Siskin IM as my primary mobile clients and Movim/Dino as my desktop clients.

While I truly appreciate the effort the maintainers put into these tools I have to admit that the UX for Moanl and Siskin IM leave a lot to be desired and if you're used to something like Whatsapp or Signal it will prove a significant barrier to convincing friends and family to adopt your new platform.

I frequently encountered UI bugs and missing features using the iOS clients and for the life of me could never get notifications working reliably on mobile (a constant bug bear for users in the Siskin and Snikket user base).

For calls and texts on mobile, I don't think I ever managed to get a reliable notification unless the application was open on the screen on iOS. This meant that I frequently missed important calls or texts when out and about. On the desktop, Dino did manage to at least always alert me when a call or a text came through, but answering the calls on was always hit or miss on my laptop for reasons that allude me.

Interestingly the most full featured and reliable client turned out to be movim, which has the caveat of being a full featured formum/social network with an xmpp client embedded. On movim I would reliably get notifications for calls and texts and could "answer" calls in any browser connected to a microphone easily.

Another thing to note if you're looking to replace your phone service is that 3G/LTE radio is very tolerant to maintaining a reliable connection on the move, jumping between cell towers. The same cannot be said for an XMPP based call, and you will encounter significant latency and drop outs trying to hold a conversation driving or on transit.

I eventually gave up on the venture after missing a few too many important notifications, but if I was to go defiantly go all in again I think I would focus on self hosting a movim instance as my base "client", as it was the most reliable and easy to use of all the ones I tried. For mobile, I did hear good things about Conversations on Android but never got around to trying that one.

I've very recently try on my NixOS homeserver both Matrix and XMPP, with the target of having family/few friends own video-calls with chats aside mostly meant as shared scrap of text more than real chats to waste time on them. Something like "remember the milk" than else.

The experience was unpleasant in both cases; in the end, I have a working setup for both, relatively working at least, but what's really missing is a single application, something you can 'go install', 'pip install', or 'cargo build', also easy for distro packagers, that features:

- a text-based configuration

- an admin WebUI (for eventual storage cleanup, moderation etc)

- a client WebUI for users

including:

- text chat with optional file uploads

- audio/video chat

- other bits on the side like long-form notes Nostr-style for a blog with comments under articles etc (yes, it's connected, it's just plain textual communication).

The core of it is just a simple snippet of text, we can transmit to some privately, or to anyone openly, and in that sense, Nostr has got it spot on: you can do chats, emails, blog posts, because everything is just a bit of text rendered with any attached media. Unfortunately, as it stands, Nostr feels like an ecosystem that lacks a clear direction; XMPP seems to be largely abandoned, with enough complexity to put most people off; Matrix looks to be heading towards a commercial future riddled with issues that keep most people away, and in the end, we don't have much. Hosting BBB or Jitsi is even worse. Hosting Asterisk or Yate to use with softphones or classic VoIP desk phones is also problematic.

There's a lot going on under the bonnet now, but why an app hasn't emerged yet that brings together features we've more or less had for decades is a bit of a mystery to me. It almost feels intentional, as if it's designed to deny free communication to the masses by making life difficult on purpose.

And still You have centalize system why not tox

Great writeup. I went through a very similar journey. Signal as the "good enough" default, then gradually wanting to own the whole stack. The bit about smacks and cloud_notify being essential for mobile is spot on, that was the part I always underestimated in past XMPP attempts. Without those two modules the experience is terrible on phones and it's no wonder people bounced off it.

One thing I'd add: if you're already running Caddy as your reverse proxy, you can use its on_demand TLS to handle certificates for the upload and conference subdomains automatically instead of managing them through certbot separately. Saves a moving part.

Curious how federation has been in practice. Are you actually messaging people on other servers, or is it mostly just you and contacts you've created accounts for?

I grew up using XMPP (I'm 25), but today I use Briar and Signal. I use text and calls for my family, because no one else but me uses Signal so it's unfair for them to use one app to talk to me and no one else.

The Cloudflare DNS challenge for certs is a nice touch — avoids exposing port 80 entirely. I set up Prosody a while back and the TURN/STUN config for voice calls was the part that tripped me up the most. coturn can be finicky with Docker networking if you're not careful about host mode vs bridged.

So, I have an XMPP account, but no one to talk to. How do you find people who use it?

I recommend that you also support implicit TLS for both client-to-server and server-to-server connections, instead of just STARTTLS. That'd be the "c2s_direct_tls_ports" and "s2s_direct_tls_ports" directives, on port 5223 and 5270 respectively. These should go into your SRV records, too. Also consider enabling SASL2.

For me the issue with the discord/signal/ telegram is they are all dependent on a 3rd party that could flip or disappear at any moment, to say nothing of the trust me bro privacy. On the other hand, email is an example of a communication system that would persist if the major supporters dropped out,but then self hosting email is a nightmare. Xmpp is better, but you still need DNS and TLS cents to participate. There are some interesting reimagined network options that seem like they could break this. My current favorite being RNS and LXMF

I ran my own XMPP server for about 15 years. Then 10(?) years ago Google's GChat migrated away from XMPP. I never had another XMPP conversation with anyone from that point on. I finally turned the XMMP daemon off off about 2 years ago to reduce my attack surface.