Make a single cross-platform client that implements every non-humorous XEP. If you tell people "on Android you should use this app, on iOS use that app" - you lose regular people fast. If you have a feature that only exists in one app on one platform, you also really lose people.
People don't really sign up for protocols, they download apps. Like I often refer to the fediverse as "Mastodon" even though I know that's not entirely correct, because it's the fastest, easiest way to communicate what I'm talking about - microblogging. So you really need a single, good app you can just tell people to download.
Also a self-hosted server with opinionated defaults. The year is 2026, and most users expect persistent history without having to add mod_mam themselves. Discord won from zero because it's IRC with history. I cannot believe that chat history, mentions, etc. is still not settled.
This may sound stupid to a predominantly GNU/Linux audience, but as a FreeBSD user(and Linux user!), when a daemon is not available for FreeBSD, it's a very bad sign.
"Because Snikket is designed natively as a tightly integrated suite of Docker containers built around the Prosody XMPP server, running it natively on FreeBSD is complex."
This is effectively settled. Every client worth using has standardized on certain extensions, and there are server capability testers for it [0].
There are still a LOT of things very much up in the air, such as message deletion, which work inconsistently from client to client, but message history is not it.
call me out if I am wrong, but isn't history dependent on the server of the chatroom creator, and doesn't every server have different history settings and does it not handle encrypted messages fully?
> People don't really sign up for protocols, they download apps.
This is both true and also if followed would fly in the face of what XMPP (and the Mastodon-flavored ActivityPub-powered fediverse of microblogs-and-more) is supposed to be about. And it's also both true and yet people understand what "email" means and how to use it without constantly and consistently running into issues trying to bang out a reply to alice@gmail.example even when the sender's inbox is hosted @yahoo.com—nor do folks spend much time thinking about how and why AT&T's SMSes (for example) are able to make their way to their friend's device even though they use Verizon (to give another example—and if they even know which provider their friend uses at all).
One thing that Jabber (and, later, Mastodon) did wrong was to take the unfortunate stance that it wouldn't be too big of a deal to adopt email-like identifiers without actually being email or implying that Internet-standard email services are available; it was felt that users would just be smart enough to adapt to it. This was a mistake.
The confusion with email, though, can be exploited as useful momentum—something that the network has going for it, instead of a flaw.
If the author and the rest of the Jabber/XMPP community wants the public to "give Jabber/XMPP a shot", then it probably does need (a) a flagship instance (a la mastodon.social) that controls multiple domains (the way that many email providers like Runbox or Fastmail do) and requires the user to pick which one they want their handle to be associated with at signup, in order to introduce email-like decentralization to the userbase as early as possible, and that (b) raises the bar by setting a standard among Jabber/XMPP instances and actually offering email services to that userbase (prior art: Google married (XMPP-based) Gtalk with Gmail in the early days).
While undertaking all of this, an effort to update the XMPP protocol (a la JMAP, but in a backwards-compatible way) while simultaneously reconciling it with legacy email (also in a backwards-compatible way) wouldn't hurt—where "backwards-compatible" here means "to gracefully degrade and provide a fallback" (prior art: Delta Chat).
Mastodon too has several client (web)apps. The Fediverse is itself a more neutral protocol with more heterogeneous platforms based on it (e.g. Lemmy, Pixelfed, etc), so Mastodon refers more to the platform (schema, UX, wider community) than the individual UI you use to access it, which just happens to usually be whatever your instance admin serves by default.
As for apps, people simply prefer instant messengers purposefully designed for their platform. There is genuinely a lot of platform-specific quirks around things like push notifications, which a non-iPhone developer not have the motivation to figure out. Besides that, a lot of these predate contemporary cross-platform technologies like Flutter.
Re: fediverse my point is - regular people just do not care about any of the fediverse-y parts of it. If I share a post I saw, I don't say "here's a thing I saw on the fediverse" - I just say "here's a thing I saw on Mastodon."
Plus the reality of the fediverse is if you want to use multiple platforms, you wind up needing multiple accounts anyway. Like if I want to upload to Peertube, I need to make a Peertube account, so we're back to where we started of having multiple places to follow people since I can't use my Mastodon account to upload to Peertube. I'm able to have some cross-platform interaction, like commenting on videos from mastodon - but there's issues there like, Pixelfed only showing people posts with images.
When talking to most people I just call the whole thing Mastodon and treat it like its a single app/service, because that's what people are used to. If I start trying to tout how the fediverse is a decentralized platform of multiple applications and you can kinda/sorta interact across platforms - people's eyes glaze right over. They just do not care.
For apps - I've never met a person that picks a messenger because its tweaked for their platform. They just prefer whatever their friends are on. iMessage is something of a odd case since Apple just rolls you into it automatically and presents it via the default app.
>If you tell people "on Android you should use this app, on iOS use that app" - you lose regular people fast.
People don't use single browser and single email client, why IM should be different? It's a deficiency when you're forced to use a single "official client".
Based on web browser statistics I've seen, most people use Chrome, some of them use Safari on their phones. There are also people who use Edge sometimes.
But most people seem to use Chrome on every device, no matter how much I wish they didn't.
Plus the sad reality is even if they're not using Chrome they're probably still using Chrome - most browsers are based on Chromium. You have Safari and Firefox, nearly everything else is just Chrome.
Also last I checked - on iOS devices even if you use Chrome, you're really using Safari - I believe apple forces all web content to be rendered using the built-in WebKit.
This comes from the before times when Internet Explorer was full of holes and Chrome was a usable browser with regular updates and before Firefox worked with all websites well.
Google has since spent the time making Chrome more locked down and user-hostile from a privacy perspective but the conventional wisdom for years was “just use Chrome” (for good reason) and that inertia continues :/
For email - most people use the official app and assume they have to use it.
You sign up for Gmail, you get the Gmail app. You sign up for Outlook, you get the Outlook app. 1 service = 1 app.
For browser - on mobile most people use whatever the default browser on their device is. On desktop - Chrome. Pretty much everybody just downloads and uses Chrome.
That was the biggest issue since the beginning - the mix and mash of supported features just meant nothing just worked - like sending files might work depending on which contact you send it to, which is experience nobody wants.
It just needs feature versions - you support this one, means you support all of the features deemed important for users, no partial mishmash.
Jabber/XMPP started to suck at the moment we've started using smartphones that keep reconnecting between wifi and mobile networks as i move around. relying on that single persistent TCP connection does not make sense anymore. This is huge pain with IRC as well... And no, i will not run server-side proxy irc client that is supposed to keep me reachable while im reconnecting.
Also sending media (or even rich text) never really worked as each client implemented it differently. While whatsapp just works...
XMPP has brilliant session management, it reconnects more seamlessly than many other protocols on mobile. It literally reconnects (rejoins the same session within different TCP connection, not replaces it with a new session).
>Also sending media (or even rich text) never really worked as each client implemented it differently.
Everyone use HTTP upload nowadays, it works all the time.
XEP-0198 is great for session management. But, Android and iOS don’t really want apps maintaining persistent sockets. WhatsApp solves this by leveraging the push infrastructure when the app is suspended.
XMPP also supports push notifications using Android and iOS infrastructure. But it also works with persistent connections, and the client notifies server when the app is not in foreground, for server to push only important data (such as direct message) to conserve battery.
Having media out of band causes some problems but eases others. Having a separate tcp window for media and messages is pretty valuable. Additionally, if media is separate, you might run it in different locations than chat.
HTTP may not have native resumption, but it's not hard to do partial upload and resumption over HTTP, you just need agreement on parameters / a protocol to determine where to resume from.
It is a bit, true, but the alternatives are worse. XEP-0231 (Bits of Binary) Base64-encoded data inside the text message is more ridiculous idea. Direct P2P connections, which were widely used before HTTP upload, are mostly not working in our day.
>it doesn't support upload resumption in case the network is bad.
Re: P2P, it's kind of making an impromptu comeback. If you want some trivia, IIRC, the developer of Conversations was on some trans-continental flight few months ago and realized that XMPP works just fine on the free onboard internet plan (being considered by the firewall as legitimate "social-usage"), except for HTTP upload. So now, when your HTTP upload fails, Conversations asks if you want to try again with P2P, so you can send your images for free from the plane :-)
XMPP is so bad on mobile that this persistent connection thingy and the whole XMPP protocol itself are effectively what prop up every single push notification on Android and Nintendo switch. True, Android vendors made a habit of killing background apps for misguided battery optimization reasons (less the case nowadays), which XMPP taught itself to work around in 2014/2015.
Same for media, it just works, you should try it? And funny you mention WhatsApp, it's effectively a dialect of XMPP running on a fork of ejabberd.
I have no problem with that with XMPP. Conversations automatically reconnects after each switch within few seconds, so it is transparent for users. On IRC that is huge pain, true.
XMPP is more reliable than Signal on iOS. My wife regularly doesn't get Signal notifications for messages that I sent when she was in a marginal service until hours later when she opens the Signal app to send me something.
On Android, I've never had any connection issues with either Signal or XMPP, so I would say that this problem is solved.
Bit of a Radio Yerevan Situation. Not even the various emergency broadcast app reliably get timely push notifications.
The thing about these notifications seem to be that apps that regularily get notifications from the the app get them reliably.
This is based on the observation that xmpp-contacts I'm in regular contact with seem to get notifications quickly and contacts I talk to less regularily not so much.
I don't think Apple is the weak link here. Somewhere there must be a gateway between an XMPP server and the APNS. Maybe the server isn't handling it well. I do know APNS was super annoying to deal with before they added the HTTP API.
Also huh, I've been to Yerevan but never heard of Radio Yerevan until now, that's pretty funny.
So, my understanding is that while XMPP has historically sucked on mobile, it's gotten better? Does anyone know about the current experience? I don't know if it's due to new XEPs or if it's just better client implementation...
I've been using it for years, so has my family and recently a group of some 60 friends with whom we communicated about a large party ont of my friend and me organised. I made an invitation site with an instance of converse.js at the bottom of the page, pointed at an anonymous group on my (Prosody) server. We just mostly Conversations or one of its forks on Android - no fruit phones among us - and Converse.js on web, higher on the same server which hosts all our other services (mail, "cloud", media, etc.). Once installed and configured it is maintenance-free, lightweight and reliable.
That is how you gain traction: by having people use it, realise the user experience is comparable or in some cases superior to that of other messaging systems - the party chat thing I mentioned above being a good example - and then realise they dont need to hand over their data to an ad broker (Google, Metafacebook, the fruit factory) or the government (all of them through some "chat control" type law).
If you're talking about the push notifications experience, then XEP-0357 solves this, but app developers have to host the infrastructure which the XMPP server calls back to and dispatches the notifications to Apple or Google. Last time I used Monal on iOS this was solved and worked well. On Android I think most apps still prefer to keep their own background connection open.
Of note, Conversations and some other XMPP clients can act as UnifiedPush Distributors (i.e. they use their own reliable persistent connection to proxy notifications for other apps). Some mastodon (tusky, fedilab, …), matrix (fluffy chat, element x, …) clients use it¹
This should be solvable, although maybe a little meh. Client developers on platforms without unrestricted background connections need to run a server for push notifications. And server developers need to accept and use a push url from the clients.
If I understand correctly, Google and Apple have a way for clients to request push tokens, but in order to use the token, you have to authenticate as the app owner, so a client unaffiliated with the server can't simply send a push token to a server and have that be used ... Instead you'd need that push proxy server.
That proxy server comes with concerns about reliability and privacy and etc, but if you do pushes without cleartext content (and you should!), the footprint is minimal and you gotta do what you gotta do.
I don't follow xmpp/jabber, but I'd hope there's already an XEP for this. It's a pretty apparent need for the last I dunno 15 years and it has a clear solution.
With the right agitation, maybe you could get sharable platform push tokens and skip the intermediary app developer pusg server, but that seems unlikely.
You probably also want something in the push system to help trace push problems. For small chat servers and smallish client push proxy servers, I expect minimal operations staffing, but when messages are being delayed because of push problems, you want to be able to let affected clients know that they need to be more agressive with periodic/background connections until push works again. You may also want to let users or the administrators of the proxy push servers know as well. Pushes might be initiated late on the origin, delayed between the origin and the proxy, queued for a long time at the proxy, delayed between the proxy and platform push, or delayed within platform push (including on device delays from Doze, etc).
You've got to be able to detect that so you can make adjustments and reduce delay. Messaging delay reduces user satisfaction.
Taking a quick look, this one is marked deferred; I don't know what that means, but it sounds like it's not an accepted standard?. It requires the application push server to be an XMPP server (which I suspect is challenging for client developers, compared to having a https url that takes a POST or similar) and doesn't include a method for a client to request a test push to validate the setup or discuss feedback to the client for push failure.
This doesn't feel solved to me.
I didn't review XEP-0198 closely, based on perhipheral ecosystem interaction, I do think that one is solved.
Both Monal and Conversations support XEP-0357. Each project runs their own XMPP-to-Apple/Google gateway for push notifications. It has to be that way because the gateway server and client phone application have to be signed by the same developer account.
The client phone app tells your XMPP server which gateway to use (or maybe it's vice-versa, the gateway contacts your server. I forget). In any event XMPP servers like Prosody support this out-of-the-box.
> The Telegram client leads in every aspect by far. It's just easy to use.
I really like Telegram, it's the closest thing to what I wish IM should be, but still it's so far from it and to be honest its apps suck now trying to shove the "premium" features down your throat. I prefer using TelegramX (or Forkgram to still be able to see statuses)
I looked into that very briefly about a decade or so ago: it would be very difficult to get it done and maintained in practice. XMPP leans towards the "dumb server/smart client" side of the trade-off, while Telegram is the exact opposite: while an XMPP client establishes and maintains a session and its state, retrieves a list of discussions, for each, requests and processes new messages, and infers reas markers and counts (a bit like a traditional mail client like thunderbird), Telegram maintains the session and the client state on the server and the client is a thin layer to just display it.
As long as the Signal desktop app is a 420 MB[1] pile of Electron, I refuse to install it. I may be a dinosaur, but a good desktop app is a requirement. I hate typing on a touch screen.
I am ok with Electron if it is needed for Matrix. Also, Telegram has a C++ desktop client.
Also, I would not advise to add proprietary repositories as you grant them root access to your system which is against security practices such as the principle of minimum privileges and defence-in-depth.
Same, it might conflicts a little with the desire to have a single application, but I want a native application for each platform which uses native UI and libraries. There's no reason a messaging app should be more than e.g. 40MB.
I'd like Jabber to establish itself as the federated, non-E2EE chat platform. OMEMO is too little too late. You want E2EE so badly, you use Signal which has figured it out better than anyone else and is still glitchy. There's a reason Telegram is more popular; most people take stability and features over security.
Some use cases like business chat actually can't have E2EE, and that'd probably be Jabber's foot in the door because no other open solution has taken off in business, and businesses don't need so much network effect. This was a main Jabber use case back in the day too.
Make decent official Jabber clients, called Jabber and not something else like a bird, and server that implements the right spec with default settings. Now is the time, you can AI slopcode entire native apps if you want to. If someone really want to put extensions on a server, it's called XMPP and isn't compatible with Jabber; the X stands for excommunicated.
> Some use cases like business chat actually can't have E2EE, and that'd probably be Jabber's foot in the door because no other open solution has taken off in business
So, Cisco Jabber (now Webex)? You can't really compete against Microsoft and its bundling strategy. Even Slack is dying, unfortunately.
I use XMPP (with OMEMO) extensively and my main problem with it is absence of some basic key trust chains and bad handling of group chats
1) With OMEMO, each client/device of a user has its own key, but there is no trust relationship between them or some common master key. I can verify and trust counterparty key, but then counterparty adds another client/device and i have to do manual verification again.
2) Group chats do not have group key, but one encrypt messages for each group member (pairwise), which means that everybody has to do key exchange with everybody. This does not scale, especially with 1), which means that even if membership is stable, new keys may appear. Some clients (Conversations) do not allow to send message to a group when they do not know some keys of some group members/devices, which is fail situation that happen pretty often.
1) I think that's by design: you've got two ways to use OMEMO, the "friendly (default)-way" (with BTBV, Blind Trust Before Verification), and the "paranoid-way" (where you verify each and every device). In the latter, you don't want your messages to be encrypted for a new, unverified device (as it could potentially be that of an attacker): you can either verify the new device yourself, or your contact can verify theirs and you verify them again. Like I said, that's not for everyone. And if you are not that paranoid, then verification is an afterthought anyway and you don't lose or gain much with verification anyway.
2) That's where MLS¹ kicks in, essentially a new encryption scheme that's suitable for large group chats. There are projects² for its adoption in XMPP. I have no strong opinion about MLS, but I tend to think that it's more for the gimmick and having XMPP score well in random protocol benchmarks: if you've got such a large groupchat that OMEMO doesn't scale anymore, you have a groupchat with so many participants that it is only private in name and more or less encryption doesn't matter.
I've tried designing an E2EE group chat system before and ran into all of these. They're not impossible to solve but are very hard. Telegram's official docs shrug off multi-device E2EE too, calling it a "mess."
I remember when I connected my XMPP client, Pidgin I think, to the Facebook XMPP server and all my Facebook "friends" appeared in Pidgin as chat contacts. That were the times. Eventually Facebook turned this possibility off...
Probably the Facebook chat is still XMPP internally even today.
If reviving XMPP is the battle you want to fight, best of luck but I'd encourage you to take a step back, face reality, and spend your energy on something with a better chance of success. And I say that as someone who used Jabber all day long 20 years ago.
I really don't understand this attitude. The landscape has changed in 25 years, XMPP was built from the ground-up for extensibility. And that was the right approach, since it managed to improve continuously, and is now on par with the dominant alternatives. In that timespan, it survived 2 or 3 generations of messengers. It will survive Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram and others (which, by their proprietary and centralized nature, are prone to enshittification).
For anyone paying attention, it should be the clear "safe bet" for what to try next/keep at hand somewhere.
So was RCS, until Google resurrected its rotting corpse and made it the default messenger for billions.
All we need is for a billion dollar company to build their own implementation and XMPP can be back once more. Exactly the way it gained popularity back in the day.
Jabber/XMPP is now over 25 years old. Its peak was back when Google Talk and Facebook Chat adopted it in the late 2000s and when Whatsapp launched using XMPP under the hood. And it largely died when those two large companies went fully proprietary around 2015.
The fact that 25 years later it's still being described as two completely different names with a slash between them ("Jabber" SLASH "XMPP" ) makes me pretty confident it's not coming back.
Don't get me wrong...I'd love open, interoperable chat that everyone is reachable by as much as anyone, but it's important to recognize when one approach isn't working and why it isn't.
Most of the critique in the post is about the low quality of Signal's app, which has zero to do with the protocol. And frankly almost every XMPP client was vastly worse in quality terms than Signal is and OTR regularly just produced garbage. It had a chance. Signal is not widespread because the only reason to use it is high privacy consciousness or being in the government and wanting secure chat with automatic deletion for conversations you're not supposed to be having.
It's a little like asking "Carburetors: How do we gain traction?"
XMPP is not a well designed protocol in many ways. There's no particular reason for anyone to care.
My attempts to use XMPP mostly start and end very quickly with the fact that there isn't a single good native XMPP client for Mac or iOS. None of Monal, Siskin or Beagle are a good experience, ChatSecure appears to be abandonware and Prose is Yet Another Web App.
I think the article brushes over something that adds (IMO) a ton of friction to Jabber/XMPP: self-hosting your own server. About 6 months ago, I tried to go down the awesome selfhosted XMPP servers list and it was just so painful I ended up finding an alternative stack.
On the contrary I found hosting an xmpp server extremely easy and very light in maintenance with prosody. I've been doing it for years and it's the part of my infrastructure that I spend the least time on certainly.
Just a self-hosted Zulip instance for family members, exposed externally via Tailscale. I wanted to try Mongoose and Snikket (possibly Prosody as well, but can't recall), but I guess my infrastructure didn't want to line up directly with what they want for a quick start. shrug
The fundamental question is: why should I use Jabber? What's the use case that makes it better than WhatsApp, Signal, et cetera?
My most-used messaging app is SMS because if you have a cell phone, you have SMS. Example this morning is I made a connection with a handyman recommended by a friend. Text message, and it just worked.
So what's the compelling reason to move to Jabber? Why should my 92-year-old mother use it?
Is it worth it to overcome network effect? Maybe just make something so useful that it is even if only people who listen to you use it, which XMPP is, and recommend it to people who are willing to try (not only because of vague curiosity, which fades very quickly, but because it's useful to them).
I disagree. XMPP wasn't designed for it, and there are already others that have done E2EE better, while still having some downsides. The only way XMPP has an edge is by not doing E2EE.
Who are those people having lot of time to re-read their old message history? I assume most people only read last several messages in a chat. This matches the real life conversations which are not stored anywhere. However, police will definitely be happy to discover that your many years messaging history is intact.
I would rather want a feature, like Telegram has, where you can set auto-delete of all messages older than N days.
Businesses want to analyze internal company messages. Chat protocols / platforms need to make inroads with one of the core audiences for online chat. Those are largely taken right now, (slack/teams business, discord gaming/oss). If it is personal/small group messaging, several E2EE options already exist, though I understand Jabber/XMPP is trying to be in the chatroom genre
You can do E2E encryption for organizations, you just establish all conversations as at least 3-way conversations: the two members of the org, and the org itself. You let the server refuse to host any conversation it isn't privy to, and then apps that support organization mode automatically add the org listener, and users using third-party clients can add it manually.
There is literally nothing about enterprise inspecting proxies that requires the client operate without default and always on crypto. That makes no sense at all.
The way businesses handle this is by installing a certificate they manage and deploy to their proxies.
Sounds like the same issue as with Mastodon. The vast majority of people are not interested in a 'protocol' (or even know what that is), they do not care what protocol powers their _app_, they just care about their app
Make a single cross-platform client that implements every non-humorous XEP. If you tell people "on Android you should use this app, on iOS use that app" - you lose regular people fast. If you have a feature that only exists in one app on one platform, you also really lose people.
People don't really sign up for protocols, they download apps. Like I often refer to the fediverse as "Mastodon" even though I know that's not entirely correct, because it's the fastest, easiest way to communicate what I'm talking about - microblogging. So you really need a single, good app you can just tell people to download.
Also a self-hosted server with opinionated defaults. The year is 2026, and most users expect persistent history without having to add mod_mam themselves. Discord won from zero because it's IRC with history. I cannot believe that chat history, mentions, etc. is still not settled.
I think Snikket [0] is supposed to do that? They even offer a turnkey hosted version.
[0] https://snikket.org/start/
This may sound stupid to a predominantly GNU/Linux audience, but as a FreeBSD user(and Linux user!), when a daemon is not available for FreeBSD, it's a very bad sign.
"Because Snikket is designed natively as a tightly integrated suite of Docker containers built around the Prosody XMPP server, running it natively on FreeBSD is complex."
Holy shit
This is effectively settled. Every client worth using has standardized on certain extensions, and there are server capability testers for it [0].
There are still a LOT of things very much up in the air, such as message deletion, which work inconsistently from client to client, but message history is not it.
[0] https://compliance.conversations.im/
call me out if I am wrong, but isn't history dependent on the server of the chatroom creator, and doesn't every server have different history settings and does it not handle encrypted messages fully?
> People don't really sign up for protocols, they download apps.
This is both true and also if followed would fly in the face of what XMPP (and the Mastodon-flavored ActivityPub-powered fediverse of microblogs-and-more) is supposed to be about. And it's also both true and yet people understand what "email" means and how to use it without constantly and consistently running into issues trying to bang out a reply to alice@gmail.example even when the sender's inbox is hosted @yahoo.com—nor do folks spend much time thinking about how and why AT&T's SMSes (for example) are able to make their way to their friend's device even though they use Verizon (to give another example—and if they even know which provider their friend uses at all).
One thing that Jabber (and, later, Mastodon) did wrong was to take the unfortunate stance that it wouldn't be too big of a deal to adopt email-like identifiers without actually being email or implying that Internet-standard email services are available; it was felt that users would just be smart enough to adapt to it. This was a mistake.
The confusion with email, though, can be exploited as useful momentum—something that the network has going for it, instead of a flaw.
If the author and the rest of the Jabber/XMPP community wants the public to "give Jabber/XMPP a shot", then it probably does need (a) a flagship instance (a la mastodon.social) that controls multiple domains (the way that many email providers like Runbox or Fastmail do) and requires the user to pick which one they want their handle to be associated with at signup, in order to introduce email-like decentralization to the userbase as early as possible, and that (b) raises the bar by setting a standard among Jabber/XMPP instances and actually offering email services to that userbase (prior art: Google married (XMPP-based) Gtalk with Gmail in the early days).
While undertaking all of this, an effort to update the XMPP protocol (a la JMAP, but in a backwards-compatible way) while simultaneously reconciling it with legacy email (also in a backwards-compatible way) wouldn't hurt—where "backwards-compatible" here means "to gracefully degrade and provide a fallback" (prior art: Delta Chat).
Mastodon too has several client (web)apps. The Fediverse is itself a more neutral protocol with more heterogeneous platforms based on it (e.g. Lemmy, Pixelfed, etc), so Mastodon refers more to the platform (schema, UX, wider community) than the individual UI you use to access it, which just happens to usually be whatever your instance admin serves by default.
As for apps, people simply prefer instant messengers purposefully designed for their platform. There is genuinely a lot of platform-specific quirks around things like push notifications, which a non-iPhone developer not have the motivation to figure out. Besides that, a lot of these predate contemporary cross-platform technologies like Flutter.
Re: fediverse my point is - regular people just do not care about any of the fediverse-y parts of it. If I share a post I saw, I don't say "here's a thing I saw on the fediverse" - I just say "here's a thing I saw on Mastodon."
Plus the reality of the fediverse is if you want to use multiple platforms, you wind up needing multiple accounts anyway. Like if I want to upload to Peertube, I need to make a Peertube account, so we're back to where we started of having multiple places to follow people since I can't use my Mastodon account to upload to Peertube. I'm able to have some cross-platform interaction, like commenting on videos from mastodon - but there's issues there like, Pixelfed only showing people posts with images.
When talking to most people I just call the whole thing Mastodon and treat it like its a single app/service, because that's what people are used to. If I start trying to tout how the fediverse is a decentralized platform of multiple applications and you can kinda/sorta interact across platforms - people's eyes glaze right over. They just do not care.
For apps - I've never met a person that picks a messenger because its tweaked for their platform. They just prefer whatever their friends are on. iMessage is something of a odd case since Apple just rolls you into it automatically and presents it via the default app.
Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software) ?
Pretty certain pidgin relies on gtk2 which is pretty dead. Most of the supported protocols are also dead, or woefully outdated like XMPP and IRC.
They've been working on a version 3 for years but no idea if that will ever happen.
You must be joking
>If you tell people "on Android you should use this app, on iOS use that app" - you lose regular people fast.
People don't use single browser and single email client, why IM should be different? It's a deficiency when you're forced to use a single "official client".
Most people don't use browsers, the few web pages they visit are opened inside wechat or telegram with an embedded webengine.
Based on web browser statistics I've seen, most people use Chrome, some of them use Safari on their phones. There are also people who use Edge sometimes.
But most people seem to use Chrome on every device, no matter how much I wish they didn't.
Plus the sad reality is even if they're not using Chrome they're probably still using Chrome - most browsers are based on Chromium. You have Safari and Firefox, nearly everything else is just Chrome.
Also last I checked - on iOS devices even if you use Chrome, you're really using Safari - I believe apple forces all web content to be rendered using the built-in WebKit.
This comes from the before times when Internet Explorer was full of holes and Chrome was a usable browser with regular updates and before Firefox worked with all websites well.
Google has since spent the time making Chrome more locked down and user-hostile from a privacy perspective but the conventional wisdom for years was “just use Chrome” (for good reason) and that inertia continues :/
Most people don't even know what a browser is. There's a pretty big difference between a reference/fallback/default client and an official one, IMO.
For email - most people use the official app and assume they have to use it.
You sign up for Gmail, you get the Gmail app. You sign up for Outlook, you get the Outlook app. 1 service = 1 app.
For browser - on mobile most people use whatever the default browser on their device is. On desktop - Chrome. Pretty much everybody just downloads and uses Chrome.
What's the market share for non-system-default browsers and/or email clients?
That is not true. Everyone uses Gmail. Everyone uses Chrome. This is true with literally less than 2% margin of error in many populations in the US.
Chrome (excl. Edge and Brave) is at 65% market share on US desktops. GMail is at 75% market share in the US.
That was the biggest issue since the beginning - the mix and mash of supported features just meant nothing just worked - like sending files might work depending on which contact you send it to, which is experience nobody wants.
It just needs feature versions - you support this one, means you support all of the features deemed important for users, no partial mishmash.
It doesn’t appear to be honestly asking.
It’s mostly whining that the world is too unfair because capitalism and people are dumb for choosing Signal, etc.
^^ this guy gets it!
Jabber/XMPP started to suck at the moment we've started using smartphones that keep reconnecting between wifi and mobile networks as i move around. relying on that single persistent TCP connection does not make sense anymore. This is huge pain with IRC as well... And no, i will not run server-side proxy irc client that is supposed to keep me reachable while im reconnecting.
Also sending media (or even rich text) never really worked as each client implemented it differently. While whatsapp just works...
XMPP has brilliant session management, it reconnects more seamlessly than many other protocols on mobile. It literally reconnects (rejoins the same session within different TCP connection, not replaces it with a new session).
>Also sending media (or even rich text) never really worked as each client implemented it differently.
Everyone use HTTP upload nowadays, it works all the time.
XEP-0198 is great for session management. But, Android and iOS don’t really want apps maintaining persistent sockets. WhatsApp solves this by leveraging the push infrastructure when the app is suspended.
XMPP also supports push notifications using Android and iOS infrastructure. But it also works with persistent connections, and the client notifies server when the app is not in foreground, for server to push only important data (such as direct message) to conserve battery.
>Everyone use HTTP upload nowadays, it works all the time
No it doesn't. Firstly, an out-of-band upload is ridiculous. Secondly, it doesn't support upload resumption in case the network is bad.
Having media out of band causes some problems but eases others. Having a separate tcp window for media and messages is pretty valuable. Additionally, if media is separate, you might run it in different locations than chat.
HTTP may not have native resumption, but it's not hard to do partial upload and resumption over HTTP, you just need agreement on parameters / a protocol to determine where to resume from.
>Firstly, an out-of-band upload is ridiculous
It is a bit, true, but the alternatives are worse. XEP-0231 (Bits of Binary) Base64-encoded data inside the text message is more ridiculous idea. Direct P2P connections, which were widely used before HTTP upload, are mostly not working in our day.
>it doesn't support upload resumption in case the network is bad.
There's a draft for HTTP for it: https://httpwg.org/http-extensions/draft-ietf-httpbis-resuma...
Re: P2P, it's kind of making an impromptu comeback. If you want some trivia, IIRC, the developer of Conversations was on some trans-continental flight few months ago and realized that XMPP works just fine on the free onboard internet plan (being considered by the firewall as legitimate "social-usage"), except for HTTP upload. So now, when your HTTP upload fails, Conversations asks if you want to try again with P2P, so you can send your images for free from the plane :-)
XMPP is so bad on mobile that this persistent connection thingy and the whole XMPP protocol itself are effectively what prop up every single push notification on Android and Nintendo switch. True, Android vendors made a habit of killing background apps for misguided battery optimization reasons (less the case nowadays), which XMPP taught itself to work around in 2014/2015.
Same for media, it just works, you should try it? And funny you mention WhatsApp, it's effectively a dialect of XMPP running on a fork of ejabberd.
I have no problem with that with XMPP. Conversations automatically reconnects after each switch within few seconds, so it is transparent for users. On IRC that is huge pain, true.
Conversations also supports Android's/Google's push notifications.
XMPP is more reliable than Signal on iOS. My wife regularly doesn't get Signal notifications for messages that I sent when she was in a marginal service until hours later when she opens the Signal app to send me something.
On Android, I've never had any connection issues with either Signal or XMPP, so I would say that this problem is solved.
Does XMPP reliably get push notifications on iOS?
Bit of a Radio Yerevan Situation. Not even the various emergency broadcast app reliably get timely push notifications.
The thing about these notifications seem to be that apps that regularily get notifications from the the app get them reliably.
This is based on the observation that xmpp-contacts I'm in regular contact with seem to get notifications quickly and contacts I talk to less regularily not so much.
Sadly this dependent on apples whims
I don't think Apple is the weak link here. Somewhere there must be a gateway between an XMPP server and the APNS. Maybe the server isn't handling it well. I do know APNS was super annoying to deal with before they added the HTTP API.
Also huh, I've been to Yerevan but never heard of Radio Yerevan until now, that's pretty funny.
My impression is that it does, but I daily-drive an Android phone, so maybe someone else here can comment?
So, my understanding is that while XMPP has historically sucked on mobile, it's gotten better? Does anyone know about the current experience? I don't know if it's due to new XEPs or if it's just better client implementation...
I've been using it for years, so has my family and recently a group of some 60 friends with whom we communicated about a large party ont of my friend and me organised. I made an invitation site with an instance of converse.js at the bottom of the page, pointed at an anonymous group on my (Prosody) server. We just mostly Conversations or one of its forks on Android - no fruit phones among us - and Converse.js on web, higher on the same server which hosts all our other services (mail, "cloud", media, etc.). Once installed and configured it is maintenance-free, lightweight and reliable.
That is how you gain traction: by having people use it, realise the user experience is comparable or in some cases superior to that of other messaging systems - the party chat thing I mentioned above being a good example - and then realise they dont need to hand over their data to an ad broker (Google, Metafacebook, the fruit factory) or the government (all of them through some "chat control" type law).
If you're talking about the push notifications experience, then XEP-0357 solves this, but app developers have to host the infrastructure which the XMPP server calls back to and dispatches the notifications to Apple or Google. Last time I used Monal on iOS this was solved and worked well. On Android I think most apps still prefer to keep their own background connection open.
https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html
> On Android I think most apps still prefer to keep their own background connection open
Many Android apps give the option of using either FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging, Google's push service), UnifiedPush or polling.
Of note, Conversations and some other XMPP clients can act as UnifiedPush Distributors (i.e. they use their own reliable persistent connection to proxy notifications for other apps). Some mastodon (tusky, fedilab, …), matrix (fluffy chat, element x, …) clients use it¹
¹: https://unifiedpush.org/users/apps/
This should be solvable, although maybe a little meh. Client developers on platforms without unrestricted background connections need to run a server for push notifications. And server developers need to accept and use a push url from the clients.
If I understand correctly, Google and Apple have a way for clients to request push tokens, but in order to use the token, you have to authenticate as the app owner, so a client unaffiliated with the server can't simply send a push token to a server and have that be used ... Instead you'd need that push proxy server.
That proxy server comes with concerns about reliability and privacy and etc, but if you do pushes without cleartext content (and you should!), the footprint is minimal and you gotta do what you gotta do.
I don't follow xmpp/jabber, but I'd hope there's already an XEP for this. It's a pretty apparent need for the last I dunno 15 years and it has a clear solution.
With the right agitation, maybe you could get sharable platform push tokens and skip the intermediary app developer pusg server, but that seems unlikely.
You probably also want something in the push system to help trace push problems. For small chat servers and smallish client push proxy servers, I expect minimal operations staffing, but when messages are being delayed because of push problems, you want to be able to let affected clients know that they need to be more agressive with periodic/background connections until push works again. You may also want to let users or the administrators of the proxy push servers know as well. Pushes might be initiated late on the origin, delayed between the origin and the proxy, queued for a long time at the proxy, delayed between the proxy and platform push, or delayed within platform push (including on device delays from Doze, etc).
You've got to be able to detect that so you can make adjustments and reduce delay. Messaging delay reduces user satisfaction.
> This should be solvable
Yes, and it has been solved long time ago already and is now widely supported by both servers and clients.
> I don't follow xmpp/jabber, but I'd hope there's already an XEP for this.
See XEP-0198 from 2004 and XEP-0357 from 2015.
> XEP-0357 from 2015
Taking a quick look, this one is marked deferred; I don't know what that means, but it sounds like it's not an accepted standard?. It requires the application push server to be an XMPP server (which I suspect is challenging for client developers, compared to having a https url that takes a POST or similar) and doesn't include a method for a client to request a test push to validate the setup or discuss feedback to the client for push failure.
This doesn't feel solved to me.
I didn't review XEP-0198 closely, based on perhipheral ecosystem interaction, I do think that one is solved.
Both Monal and Conversations support XEP-0357. Each project runs their own XMPP-to-Apple/Google gateway for push notifications. It has to be that way because the gateway server and client phone application have to be signed by the same developer account.
The client phone app tells your XMPP server which gateway to use (or maybe it's vice-versa, the gateway contacts your server. I forget). In any event XMPP servers like Prosody support this out-of-the-box.
I hope more people realize, protocol is not the problem, user experience is.
The Telegram client leads in every aspect by far. It's just easy to use.
> The Telegram client leads in every aspect by far. It's just easy to use.
I really like Telegram, it's the closest thing to what I wish IM should be, but still it's so far from it and to be honest its apps suck now trying to shove the "premium" features down your throat. I prefer using TelegramX (or Forkgram to still be able to see statuses)
This is true. Telegram is fast, stable and has some leading and meaningful features. On mobile AND desktop.
I'm really surprised that nobody bothered making a fork of the Telegram open source client that works with XMPP.
I looked into that very briefly about a decade or so ago: it would be very difficult to get it done and maintained in practice. XMPP leans towards the "dumb server/smart client" side of the trade-off, while Telegram is the exact opposite: while an XMPP client establishes and maintains a session and its state, retrieves a list of discussions, for each, requests and processes new messages, and infers reas markers and counts (a bit like a traditional mail client like thunderbird), Telegram maintains the session and the client state on the server and the client is a thin layer to just display it.
As long as the Signal desktop app is a 420 MB[1] pile of Electron, I refuse to install it. I may be a dinosaur, but a good desktop app is a requirement. I hate typing on a touch screen.
I am ok with Electron if it is needed for Matrix. Also, Telegram has a C++ desktop client.
Also, I would not advise to add proprietary repositories as you grant them root access to your system which is against security practices such as the principle of minimum privileges and defence-in-depth.
Same, it might conflicts a little with the desire to have a single application, but I want a native application for each platform which uses native UI and libraries. There's no reason a messaging app should be more than e.g. 40MB.
As a dinosaur, maybe dino.im is something for you ;)
I'd like Jabber to establish itself as the federated, non-E2EE chat platform. OMEMO is too little too late. You want E2EE so badly, you use Signal which has figured it out better than anyone else and is still glitchy. There's a reason Telegram is more popular; most people take stability and features over security.
Some use cases like business chat actually can't have E2EE, and that'd probably be Jabber's foot in the door because no other open solution has taken off in business, and businesses don't need so much network effect. This was a main Jabber use case back in the day too.
Make decent official Jabber clients, called Jabber and not something else like a bird, and server that implements the right spec with default settings. Now is the time, you can AI slopcode entire native apps if you want to. If someone really want to put extensions on a server, it's called XMPP and isn't compatible with Jabber; the X stands for excommunicated.
> Some use cases like business chat actually can't have E2EE, and that'd probably be Jabber's foot in the door because no other open solution has taken off in business
So, Cisco Jabber (now Webex)? You can't really compete against Microsoft and its bundling strategy. Even Slack is dying, unfortunately.
You can't beat Microsoft at this, at best you can be a choice for those who want in-house instead of trusting Microsoft.
Webex can't be run on-prem, can it? I vaguely know about the old Cisco Jabber.
I use XMPP (with OMEMO) extensively and my main problem with it is absence of some basic key trust chains and bad handling of group chats
1) With OMEMO, each client/device of a user has its own key, but there is no trust relationship between them or some common master key. I can verify and trust counterparty key, but then counterparty adds another client/device and i have to do manual verification again.
2) Group chats do not have group key, but one encrypt messages for each group member (pairwise), which means that everybody has to do key exchange with everybody. This does not scale, especially with 1), which means that even if membership is stable, new keys may appear. Some clients (Conversations) do not allow to send message to a group when they do not know some keys of some group members/devices, which is fail situation that happen pretty often.
1) I think that's by design: you've got two ways to use OMEMO, the "friendly (default)-way" (with BTBV, Blind Trust Before Verification), and the "paranoid-way" (where you verify each and every device). In the latter, you don't want your messages to be encrypted for a new, unverified device (as it could potentially be that of an attacker): you can either verify the new device yourself, or your contact can verify theirs and you verify them again. Like I said, that's not for everyone. And if you are not that paranoid, then verification is an afterthought anyway and you don't lose or gain much with verification anyway.
2) That's where MLS¹ kicks in, essentially a new encryption scheme that's suitable for large group chats. There are projects² for its adoption in XMPP. I have no strong opinion about MLS, but I tend to think that it's more for the gimmick and having XMPP score well in random protocol benchmarks: if you've got such a large groupchat that OMEMO doesn't scale anymore, you have a groupchat with so many participants that it is only private in name and more or less encryption doesn't matter.
¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messaging_Layer_Security
²: https://nlnet.nl/project/XMPP-MLS/
I've tried designing an E2EE group chat system before and ran into all of these. They're not impossible to solve but are very hard. Telegram's official docs shrug off multi-device E2EE too, calling it a "mess."
I remember when I connected my XMPP client, Pidgin I think, to the Facebook XMPP server and all my Facebook "friends" appeared in Pidgin as chat contacts. That were the times. Eventually Facebook turned this possibility off...
Probably the Facebook chat is still XMPP internally even today.
And Google Talk. And WhatsApp.
https://www.process-one.net/blog/whatsapp-facebook-erlang-an...
traction? the xmpp moment was 20 years ago. it's over now
Yep. He's dead, Jim.
If reviving XMPP is the battle you want to fight, best of luck but I'd encourage you to take a step back, face reality, and spend your energy on something with a better chance of success. And I say that as someone who used Jabber all day long 20 years ago.
I really don't understand this attitude. The landscape has changed in 25 years, XMPP was built from the ground-up for extensibility. And that was the right approach, since it managed to improve continuously, and is now on par with the dominant alternatives. In that timespan, it survived 2 or 3 generations of messengers. It will survive Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram and others (which, by their proprietary and centralized nature, are prone to enshittification).
For anyone paying attention, it should be the clear "safe bet" for what to try next/keep at hand somewhere.
So was RCS, until Google resurrected its rotting corpse and made it the default messenger for billions.
All we need is for a billion dollar company to build their own implementation and XMPP can be back once more. Exactly the way it gained popularity back in the day.
The software playing field is different with AI. Like making nice mobile/desktop apps used to be a serious barrier.
Jabber/XMPP is now over 25 years old. Its peak was back when Google Talk and Facebook Chat adopted it in the late 2000s and when Whatsapp launched using XMPP under the hood. And it largely died when those two large companies went fully proprietary around 2015.
The fact that 25 years later it's still being described as two completely different names with a slash between them ("Jabber" SLASH "XMPP" ) makes me pretty confident it's not coming back.
Don't get me wrong...I'd love open, interoperable chat that everyone is reachable by as much as anyone, but it's important to recognize when one approach isn't working and why it isn't.
There's a lot of lessons to be learned from the death of jabber which I outlined in a post back on 2019: https://larrysalibra.com/the-death-of-jabber/
I think the main problem was the fragmentation & extensions
Most of the critique in the post is about the low quality of Signal's app, which has zero to do with the protocol. And frankly almost every XMPP client was vastly worse in quality terms than Signal is and OTR regularly just produced garbage. It had a chance. Signal is not widespread because the only reason to use it is high privacy consciousness or being in the government and wanting secure chat with automatic deletion for conversations you're not supposed to be having.
It's a little like asking "Carburetors: How do we gain traction?"
XMPP is not a well designed protocol in many ways. There's no particular reason for anyone to care.
My attempts to use XMPP mostly start and end very quickly with the fact that there isn't a single good native XMPP client for Mac or iOS. None of Monal, Siskin or Beagle are a good experience, ChatSecure appears to be abandonware and Prose is Yet Another Web App.
I think the article brushes over something that adds (IMO) a ton of friction to Jabber/XMPP: self-hosting your own server. About 6 months ago, I tried to go down the awesome selfhosted XMPP servers list and it was just so painful I ended up finding an alternative stack.
On the contrary I found hosting an xmpp server extremely easy and very light in maintenance with prosody. I've been doing it for years and it's the part of my infrastructure that I spend the least time on certainly.
What stack did you land on?
Just a self-hosted Zulip instance for family members, exposed externally via Tailscale. I wanted to try Mongoose and Snikket (possibly Prosody as well, but can't recall), but I guess my infrastructure didn't want to line up directly with what they want for a quick start. shrug
The fundamental question is: why should I use Jabber? What's the use case that makes it better than WhatsApp, Signal, et cetera?
My most-used messaging app is SMS because if you have a cell phone, you have SMS. Example this morning is I made a connection with a handyman recommended by a friend. Text message, and it just worked.
So what's the compelling reason to move to Jabber? Why should my 92-year-old mother use it?
There’s no official way to “tag” people on Jabber. Clients do it but the protocol doesn’t.
This is (to me) a big issue when using bots, for example. I need a non-ambiguous trigger for them.
There is a XEP for it but as per usual, it's experimental and not widely implemented: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0513.html
https://xmpp.org/software/?category=clients&xeps=0513
Is it worth it to overcome network effect? Maybe just make something so useful that it is even if only people who listen to you use it, which XMPP is, and recommend it to people who are willing to try (not only because of vague curiosity, which fades very quickly, but because it's useful to them).
I love XMPP, but its OTR plugin is kind of glitchy.
E2E encryption should be part of the main protocol spec and mandatory. It's 2026 now. Nobody needs a messenger that isn't encrypted.
I disagree. XMPP wasn't designed for it, and there are already others that have done E2EE better, while still having some downsides. The only way XMPP has an edge is by not doing E2EE.
E2EE will never be the default, because people lose their devices all the time, and don't want to lose message history.
Who are those people having lot of time to re-read their old message history? I assume most people only read last several messages in a chat. This matches the real life conversations which are not stored anywhere. However, police will definitely be happy to discover that your many years messaging history is intact.
I would rather want a feature, like Telegram has, where you can set auto-delete of all messages older than N days.
It's the default/only option for popular apps like Signal or WhatsApp.
If message history is important it should be backed up on the receiver's end after decryption, like WhatsApp and signal do.
WhatsApp doesn't even have the option to disable e2ee anymore and it's doing just fine, despite their best efforts to screw over their customers.
WhatsApp depends heavily on centralization.
> Nobody needs a messenger that isn't encrypted.
Businesses want to analyze internal company messages. Chat protocols / platforms need to make inroads with one of the core audiences for online chat. Those are largely taken right now, (slack/teams business, discord gaming/oss). If it is personal/small group messaging, several E2EE options already exist, though I understand Jabber/XMPP is trying to be in the chatroom genre
You can do E2E encryption for organizations, you just establish all conversations as at least 3-way conversations: the two members of the org, and the org itself. You let the server refuse to host any conversation it isn't privy to, and then apps that support organization mode automatically add the org listener, and users using third-party clients can add it manually.
The org can just host non-E2EE XMPP, and it'd be the same as this wrt trust, easier to implement too.
E2EE has well known issues for scaling, which is why it's found primarily in small group / personal chat
There is literally nothing about enterprise inspecting proxies that requires the client operate without default and always on crypto. That makes no sense at all.
The way businesses handle this is by installing a certificate they manage and deploy to their proxies.
one does not typically do data science on message content by capturing it at the proxy, go to the database and dump the data set
Not every messenger needs to support every use case
you'll need one major group if traction is the goal, which seems to be what the posted link is really after
chat is network effect, so a chat app needs to answer "which network of people" if the creators about traction?
Everybody has switched to OMEMO. It's the same encryption standard which Signal uses. It supports multiple devices and encrypted group chats as well.
OMEMO has superseded xmpp for a while now.
"Signal doesn’t actually suck. It’s fine. It gets the job done. It lets me communicate with my friends."
The beginning was complaining about Signal! What is XMPP needed for then? Also, doesn't seem like many people have friends on either of them.
Sounds like the same issue as with Mastodon. The vast majority of people are not interested in a 'protocol' (or even know what that is), they do not care what protocol powers their _app_, they just care about their app
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