> 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?
inputmice•Aug 24, 2026
XMPP these days often gets used as a friends-and-family style messenger (Think WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal replacement) rather than something communities would use (Discord/IRC). A lot of users of XMPP are also out of the public eye. NATO, police forces and intelligence agencies use it. The community style channels are supported though and a search engine for them can be found here: https://search.jabber.network/channels/1
Semaphor•Aug 24, 2026
Yeah, I use it as a messenger for my wife and I.
svyatoslavpavl•Aug 24, 2026
Jitsi Meet still runs on XMPP, Prosody handles the signaling. WhatsApp also started life as a patched ejabberd.
iamcalledrob•Aug 24, 2026
WhatsApp is still based on XMPP unless things have changed a lot recently.
alex1138•Aug 24, 2026
I don't consider WA a product. I don't consider it a viable product. Post-2014/Zuckerberg. Who cares if it's XMPP, it didn't federate
XMPP is somewhat popular on the fediverse, especially the Pleroma side. If you meet people there who want to chat elsewhere, they likely are on XMPP. Also if you have a Disroot account it comes with XMPP.
kogasa240p•Aug 24, 2026
Its biggest issue is adoption because it's very solid otherwise and even supports stuff like screen sharing.
tcfhgj•Aug 24, 2026
screensharing is ubiquitous at this point
lnz_me•Aug 24, 2026
i set up a xmpp server a few weeks ago for agent orchestration and agent to human workflows. hadn't inatalled ejabberd in a very long time but feeling right at home.
zeafoamrun•Aug 24, 2026
And I haven't used XMPP for about 20 of them (sadly)
giancarlostoro•Aug 24, 2026
There was a time where both Google Chat (whatever it was called back then I lost track) and Facebook Chat were built on it. So you might have.
zeafoamrun•Aug 24, 2026
You're right. I know at least one company used XMPP for things like customer support chat too. So maybe I have. I just mean the last time I used it intentionally was a long time ago before I was worn down futilely trying to convince friends to use it instead of locked down chat apps.
giancarlostoro•Aug 24, 2026
That's fair, no worries.
seba_dos1•Aug 24, 2026
Google Talk - and it was an actual federating XMPP server, in contrast to Facebook which merely allowed you to login with an XMPP client.
giancarlostoro•Aug 24, 2026
There was a point where Google and Facebook supported external clients, and then within the same year both Google and Facebook closed up to any external clients, then ultimately ditching XMPP.
esafak•Aug 24, 2026
25 years of independence and, dare I say, irrelevance.
delduca•Aug 24, 2026
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
exe34•Aug 24, 2026
I had amsn when msn and yahoo messenger were the place everybody I knew was at.
d3Xt3r•Aug 24, 2026
I was on Miranda. It was tiny and portable (unlike Trillian) and could connect to pretty much every popular messaging service, including IRC. And in spite of being able to connect to everything, it used far lesser memory than even just a single instance of MSN and Yahoo. It was one of my go-to apps that I'd install on a freshly formatted PC back in the day.
zerozerotwo•Aug 24, 2026
This used to be one of the biggest Mac open source projects. I remember they demoed project builder (before Xcode) compiling it
nunez•Aug 25, 2026
Best chat client ever. Man we had it good back then.
delduca•Aug 24, 2026
I think Android still uses XMPP to delivery push notifications under the hood
inputmice•Aug 24, 2026
Indeed. And on a Google-free Android phone the XMPP client Conversations can utilize its existing, permanent XMPP connection to deliver push notifications to other (mostly open-source) apps using an alternative to Google push (FCM) called UnifiedPush.
Unless I'm mistaken, Apple's push notifications network ("APN") and a few other macOS/iOS under-the-hood things are also built on top of XMPP.
1970-01-01•Aug 24, 2026
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!
grumbel•Aug 24, 2026
> XMPP is the pinnacle of chat that just works.
Not my experience. I had to give up on it since it was just completely flooded with spam, and unlike mail readers that have ways to mitigate it, XMPP clients were ill prepared. Might still work if you keep your address hidden, but as chat-like alternative to a public email it just stopped working years ago.
fluoridation•Aug 24, 2026
What do you mean? You have to accept a friend request before someone can message you. It's more spam-resistant than email, not less. That said, I don't know if there's anything that prevents spamming friend requests.
grumbel•Aug 24, 2026
And how am I going to find the valid friend requests under the hundreds of spam ones? I used it just like a chat version of public email, for bug reports and such, so I don't know who is going to message me beforehand.
fluoridation•Aug 24, 2026
Fair enough. I've only ever used XMPP when Google chat used it and at work in the days before Slack.
ezst•Aug 24, 2026
You can mediate friends requests by having servers generate an invite link, you can generate QR codes your friend can scan on a side channel, ... There are ways
justsomehnguy•Aug 25, 2026
Or you can just show the welcome message from a new contact, just like anyone else does. Adding a 2nd factor here is the reason XMPP suck.
daneel_w•Aug 24, 2026
I think that's a symptom of the provider you chose, not the XMPP sphere itself. I've used Jabber/XMPP for just over 15 years and while I've seen plenty of bullshit going on in various highly popular MUCs (join-floods, phishing attempts and such) I've never personally been subjected to spam directed at me.
tcfhgj•Aug 24, 2026
I have joined XMPP rooms via Matrix and have already gotten spam from XMPP this way
zaik•Aug 24, 2026
Which is surprising since XMPP allows you to hide your global address in public rooms and Matrix doesn't (unless they fixed it by now?).
troupo•Aug 24, 2026
> XMPP is the pinnacle of chat that just works.
No. It doesn't "just work". It very much depends on which subset of the XEPs all the parties in the chain support.
> All other popular systems and servers went defunct;
Well, in this sense it does just work :)
upofadown•Aug 25, 2026
You can always send and receive messages no matter what XEPs are supported. Not that that is a problem in practice. There is a fairly well established subset of XEPs that everyone supports.
Unless you want to encrypt said messages. But I guess insecure communication beats no communication at all. (I also never had much luck with voice and video calls using XMPP.)
justsomehnguy•Aug 25, 2026
> XMPP is the pinnacle of chat that just works.
Except no.
You can't even have a conversation between Conversations and Fluux because OMEMO is enabled by default in Conversations and there is just no OMEMO support in Fluux - despite it being actually modern one.
Gajim works but Pidgin doesn't even show "I sent you an OMEMO encrypted message but your client doesn’t seem to support that". Just like images, which is a first party in Telegram and even WhatsApp.
So much for 'just works'.
F3nd0•Aug 25, 2026
And of course most XMPP clients which support OMEMO only support an old version of it, which is incompatible with the new OMEMO version, currently only supported by KDE’s own client—Kaidan. That also happens to be the only desktop client I feel like I’d actually enjoy using (if only I could use it to talk with people not using Kaidan).
opan•Aug 25, 2026
I regularly use IRC, XMPP, and Matrix. I think your description fits IRC better. XMPP kinda has a Plan 9 or Amiga type of vibe, cult following "ahead of its time", but never took off totally how people hoped, or didn't stay relevant at least.
fishgoesblub•Aug 24, 2026
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?
It makes sense. It's old, crufty mix of extensions, which nobody actually wants to be that modular for a chat client, because that just gets you into mess of what server/client supports
zaik•Aug 24, 2026
> mess of what server/client supports
If you allow for independent implementations of the protocol this will always happen. Also, inventing another non-standard protocol creates even more incompatibility between clients and servers.
opan•Aug 25, 2026
IRC and email worked out pretty well I think.
akho•Aug 24, 2026
Matrix is in the same place wrt feature mismatches. It's a quality of the problem, not of the solution. I actually think XMPP does a better, more structured job here.
neilalexander•Aug 24, 2026
XMPP leans heavily on capability negotiation and service discovery which makes it straightforward to degrade gracefully when feature mismatches occur. Matrix is significantly lacking in this regard.
shadowgovt•Aug 25, 2026
Unfortunately, some of the features that can degrade are things like "the chat is actually secure."
opan•Aug 25, 2026
I strongly prefer that with XMPP I can disable the encryption when it breaks to tell my friend I'm trapped under a boulder and bleeding out. With Matrix our chat is encrypted, I can't turn it off ever, if it stops working I can't communicate, my only option is to make a new room with encryption disabled and invite my friend hoping he sees the invite and accepts in time.
tcfhgj•Aug 24, 2026
> Matrix is in the same place wrt feature mismatches.
not it isn't - still today there's no choice between incompatible room types or incompatible encryption algorithms and whatever else.
vcccgjuf•Aug 24, 2026
Matrix is nearly as old today as XMPP was when the Matrix project was started, and Matrix is still such a pile of shit standard that there's STILL only one server implementation and one client. That's actually not how the standard was designed; if Matrix had been a successful project, according to their own goals, the ecosystem would look a lot more like XMPP than it does.
Comparing XMPP at 11 years old to Matrix today makes it abundantly clear that the main thing Element LLC does is waste European public grant funds
tcfhgj•Aug 24, 2026
Actually, Matrix has a series of server and client implementations.
Also, imho Matrix is a better standard than xmpp, because of what PunchHamster said and the better feature set.
Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion :)
opan•Aug 25, 2026
I think GP was speaking hyperbolically, because most new features hit Element/Synapse first and other clients lag behind implementing them. If you care about more than the basics working, it's kind of just the illusion of choice.
shadowgovt•Aug 25, 2026
"Oh, I'm sorry, did you want it to work? You should have installed the 'it actually works' modules."
Working with XMPP gave me a whole new appreciation for why people keep inventing their own chat protocols. I don't think this is an unsalvageable situation, but the protocol is desperately in need of an "XMPP: the Good Parts" doc.
tredre3•Aug 25, 2026
> the protocol is desperately in need of an "XMPP: the Good Parts" doc.
It's because the xmpp standard is absolutely brutal. I've tried to stand up a server and the amount of configuration I had to do just to get off the ground was absolute nonsense.
It's sort of the Apache of chat protocols and that's not a compliment.
Semaphor•Aug 25, 2026
> I've tried to stand up a server and the amount of configuration I had to do
I run my own server for 2 people. Using Prosody [0] took some config but wasn’t that hard. Easier than installing Arch, harder than installing Windows ;)
Nowadays, there is also Snikket [1] by the Prosody maintainer, which is essentially an opinionated all-in-one configuration setup based on Prosody, barely any config needed.
Counter point: I ran prosody for years and changed almost nothing to the defaults.
Just like with Apache, all you need is a sane default configuration that covers the most common use cases, and I think modern XMPP servers offer that.
Semaphor•Aug 25, 2026
FWIW, I think I had to fight a bit to figure out setting everything up correctly for uploads to work. But as I said in sibling, nothing too problematic.
basilgohar•Aug 24, 2026
I loved using XMPP and used to run my own server and even had the apps that would send notifications from my phone for different events over XMPP (forgot the name at the moment).
I'm all-in on Matrix right now and use it for my family but it's a far cry from the usability that XMPP had. I am still hopeful that Matrix can live up to its promises but perhaps XMPP will always be around if that doesn't work out. Who knows!
wycx•Aug 24, 2026
MAXS? As far as I can tell, it is broken by newer versions of Android.
bborud•Aug 24, 2026
If only they had avoided XML. XML drove away a lot of people who would otherwise have been interested early on.
(I once found myself in the same meeting as two of the people who made the mistakes that meant you couldn’t just pipe stuff through an XML parser and hope it worked. I tend to speak my mind)
tolerance•Aug 24, 2026
I had a good technical experience using XMPP once but the community I found using it was an obscure one and I haven't come across another instance of others using it since. No matter how useful a tool is the main hurdle is adoption. This sort of retrospective is useful from an advocacy point of view.
abound•Aug 24, 2026
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.
unethical_ban•Aug 24, 2026
I think of Matrix as a protocol + client/server suite; an open standard with official software backing it and a number of parallel implementations. When I wanted to stand up an independent server that could do most of what Discord does for communities, Matrix was the easy find. Encrypted chat, e2e support, and encrypted voice and video chat rooms with screen share.
I admit I didn't research "XMPP-based discord alternative" but maybe that says something about the ecosystem's health.
Daunk•Aug 24, 2026
XMPP always seemed great, buy I have yet to find a client that can replace Telegram's client on both desktop and mobile.
colechristensen•Aug 24, 2026
My first task at my first real tech job was setting up an ejabberd server
pavo-etc•Aug 24, 2026
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.
pi-msg doesn't support bonjour, I'm running it on a nixos server (nix is the real secret ingredient of my whole setup) the xmpp server is the same machine as the agents. I'm almost always on a different network to the one where the server is. If the server goes down the agents and ejabberd are coming down simultaneously.
tehnoslow•Aug 24, 2026
Cool use case with the agents, hadn't thought of that
dhc02•Aug 25, 2026
This is really neat. I've recently been watching people use custom pi harnesses and thinking of jumping in, but I was dreaming of a way to do essentially what pi-msg does so that I could drive it remotely in a more full-featured way. Thanks for sharing.
pavo-etc•Aug 25, 2026
Thanks! I had the same urge, I didn't want to be responsible for an entire GUI and communication layer but I did want to have a remotely controllable extensible harness, this was the perfect middle ground.
The benefit beyond that was having agents running on my server directly so they can do a lot of sysadmin and monitoring tasks, as well as suggesting config changes through PRs to my nix config.
dhc02•Aug 25, 2026
Letting the agents bang their heads against the wall hunting down a config fix for a random malfunctioning piece of my homelab instead of me is by far my favorite part of the AI present.
dpc_01234•Aug 25, 2026
Any Android XMPP client recommendations? I tried one, then it's fork Monocle, and none of the seem to be able to handle simple notifications correctly.
Semaphor•Aug 25, 2026
Never had notifications issues with conversations.
opan•Aug 25, 2026
Seconding Conversations, though I wish it'd let me disable relative timestamps.
_carbyau_•Aug 25, 2026
When I ever have time...
1. Gain/find-someone-with crypto library use knowledge.
2. Jabber client with Iroh networking and E2EE.
3. Completely remove XMPP server dependence.
4. Allow users to exchange Iroh-Node-ID outside of jabber (QR code, other secure channels?), store in Jabber contacts.
5. Develop from there. Calendar usage, multiparty, backups.
But I have neither the time nor the knowhow right now.
bobanrocky•Aug 25, 2026
We use xmpp for our company’s IOT product suite. Works quite well with its presence and messaging capabilities ..
Backend runs ejabberd.
19 Comments
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?
There was a talk at FOSDEM about that.
https://gultsch.video/w/gRGZqKKvNBvvMesyWNQzoK
Not my experience. I had to give up on it since it was just completely flooded with spam, and unlike mail readers that have ways to mitigate it, XMPP clients were ill prepared. Might still work if you keep your address hidden, but as chat-like alternative to a public email it just stopped working years ago.
No. It doesn't "just work". It very much depends on which subset of the XEPs all the parties in the chain support.
> All other popular systems and servers went defunct;
Well, in this sense it does just work :)
https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0479.html
https://compliance.conversations.im/
Except no.
You can't even have a conversation between Conversations and Fluux because OMEMO is enabled by default in Conversations and there is just no OMEMO support in Fluux - despite it being actually modern one.
Gajim works but Pidgin doesn't even show "I sent you an OMEMO encrypted message but your client doesn’t seem to support that". Just like images, which is a first party in Telegram and even WhatsApp.
So much for 'just works'.
[0]: https://movim.eu/
[1]: https://github.com/processone/fluux-messenger
If you allow for independent implementations of the protocol this will always happen. Also, inventing another non-standard protocol creates even more incompatibility between clients and servers.
not it isn't - still today there's no choice between incompatible room types or incompatible encryption algorithms and whatever else.
Comparing XMPP at 11 years old to Matrix today makes it abundantly clear that the main thing Element LLC does is waste European public grant funds
Servers: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/servers/
Clients: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
Also, imho Matrix is a better standard than xmpp, because of what PunchHamster said and the better feature set. Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion :)
Working with XMPP gave me a whole new appreciation for why people keep inventing their own chat protocols. I don't think this is an unsalvageable situation, but the protocol is desperately in need of an "XMPP: the Good Parts" doc.
It exists! https://docs.modernxmpp.org/
https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0479.html
It's sort of the Apache of chat protocols and that's not a compliment.
I run my own server for 2 people. Using Prosody [0] took some config but wasn’t that hard. Easier than installing Arch, harder than installing Windows ;)
Nowadays, there is also Snikket [1] by the Prosody maintainer, which is essentially an opinionated all-in-one configuration setup based on Prosody, barely any config needed.
[0]: https://prosody.im/
[1]: https://snikket.org/
Just like with Apache, all you need is a sane default configuration that covers the most common use cases, and I think modern XMPP servers offer that.
I'm all-in on Matrix right now and use it for my family but it's a far cry from the usability that XMPP had. I am still hopeful that Matrix can live up to its promises but perhaps XMPP will always be around if that doesn't work out. Who knows!
(I once found myself in the same meeting as two of the people who made the mistakes that meant you couldn’t just pipe stuff through an XML parser and hope it worked. I tend to speak my mind)
I admit I didn't research "XMPP-based discord alternative" but maybe that says something about the ecosystem's health.
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.
[0]: https://github.com/zachpmanson/pi-msg
https://github.com/gatlin/pii
pi-msg doesn't support bonjour, I'm running it on a nixos server (nix is the real secret ingredient of my whole setup) the xmpp server is the same machine as the agents. I'm almost always on a different network to the one where the server is. If the server goes down the agents and ejabberd are coming down simultaneously.
The benefit beyond that was having agents running on my server directly so they can do a lot of sysadmin and monitoring tasks, as well as suggesting config changes through PRs to my nix config.
1. Gain/find-someone-with crypto library use knowledge.
2. Jabber client with Iroh networking and E2EE.
3. Completely remove XMPP server dependence.
4. Allow users to exchange Iroh-Node-ID outside of jabber (QR code, other secure channels?), store in Jabber contacts.
5. Develop from there. Calendar usage, multiparty, backups.
But I have neither the time nor the knowhow right now.