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As one of those few hundred people who actively use FastMail's XMPP, I guess I'm now in the market for an alternative. I need exactly one federated account on m

by farski 11y ago

As one of those few hundred people who actively use FastMail's XMPP, I guess I'm now in the market for an alternative. I need exactly one federated account on my domain, so a standalone service probably isn't going to make sense financially. From a DIY perspective, what are the options? Are Ignite, Prosody, and ejabberd the only viable options? Are they all being maintained? Is there anything out there that works at a small scale; like a Node server that could run on OpenShift, or something else super lightweight?

stock_toaster 11y ago
I ran prosody for a while. I found it lightweight, fairly easy to configure, and it worked quite well. Just don't forget to set up the magic srv records if you go the self host route.
brongondwana 11y ago
We had a bad experience with ejabberd pre-release version 3 (had an intern spend the entire summer on it, and I put some time in too): http://blog.fastmail.com/2012/09/26/one-step-forward-two-steps-back/ http://blog.fastmail.com/2012/09/26/one-step-forward-two-ste... Honestly Prosody looks the best. We were planning to switch to it when async login support and scalability to thousands of domains was stable... but that was 2 years ago and it never quite materialised - and now DJabberd is so far behind in support for "standard XMPP" and the interoperability of the remaining servers that we just had to give up. I argued strongly against it, having spent so many bloody years on making this thing work - including tons of patches to DJabberd and some EJabberd hacking as well - but the numbers didn't lie. Better to spend our time on exciting things like the currently-in-testing cross-domain support for Cyrus IMAPd and reverse ACL lookup that will make the LIST command blindingly fast even on big servers. I'm hoping to be able to say two steps forward, one step back this time instead :)
- hackerboos 11y ago
  Did you look into MongooseIM?
zanny 11y ago
Duckduckgo has their own XMPP server you can signup for, its what I use for everything. Not sure what extensions it supports (or lack thereof) since I only use it for single user chats.
- colanderman 11y ago
  Sadly DDG doesn't seem to support using my own identity via SRV records like FastMail does.
simoncion 11y ago
Like brogondwana says, from the commit log on their github repo, it's clear (years after that fastmail blog post) that Process One has abandoned ejabberd 3.x. ejabberd 2.x appears to continue to have updates. [0] Having said that, for my single-account, single-site needs, ejabberd worked just fine for me for the several years between the time that I learned about the fact that Google Talk federated with XMPP servers and the time that Google stopped federating with other XMPP server operators. I can't speak to how comprehensive ejabberd is, but for one-on-one chats, and multi-user chats, it worked just fine when I was using it. [0] https://github.com/processone/ejabberd https://github.com/processone/ejabberd
- merijnv 11y ago
  > and the time that Google stopped federating with other XMPP server operators. I see this keep getting repeated, but AFAIK there was only like a month long time they temporarily suspended federation for adding new contacts due to a spam issue? I've been talking to people on Google Talk from my (FastMail, sadly) XMPP account for the past year without issue? Am I going crazy?
  - simoncion 11y ago
    I remember that roughly around the time Google declared that they were deactivating XMPP federation, I was suddenly unable to make -IIRC- s2s connections between Google Talk and my XMPP server, and message delivery failed 100% of the time. This situation persisted for quite a while (weeks? months?), and I -having noone to talk to- shut down my server. Google might have changed their mind and quietly started federating again. I haven't checked in ages. Guess I have another project to complete this weekend. :)
LeoPanthera 11y ago
I used Prosody. It's pretty simple to setup. You can get free certs from StartSSL to make it secure. I shut off my server just recently, because no-one uses XMPP anymore.
hippich 11y ago
I never tried it, since so far i am using xmpp as a gateway to some service, but sovereign has something related to xmpp - you might want to check it out - https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign

by farski 11y ago

stock_toaster 11y ago

I ran prosody for a while. I found it lightweight, fairly easy to configure, and it worked quite well. Just don't forget to set up the magic srv records if you go the self host route.

brongondwana 11y ago

We had a bad experience with ejabberd pre-release version 3 (had an intern spend the entire summer on it, and I put some time in too): http://blog.fastmail.com/2012/09/26/one-step-forward-two-steps-back/ http://blog.fastmail.com/2012/09/26/one-step-forward-two-ste... Honestly Prosody looks the best. We were planning to switch to it when async login support and scalability to thousands of domains was stable... but that was 2 years ago and it never quite materialised - and now DJabberd is so far behind in support for "standard XMPP" and the interoperability of the remaining servers that we just had to give up. I argued strongly against it, having spent so many bloody years on making this thing work - including tons of patches to DJabberd and some EJabberd hacking as well - but the numbers didn't lie. Better to spend our time on exciting things like the currently-in-testing cross-domain support for Cyrus IMAPd and reverse ACL lookup that will make the LIST command blindingly fast even on big servers. I'm hoping to be able to say two steps forward, one step back this time instead :)

hackerboos 11y ago
Did you look into MongooseIM?

zanny 11y ago

Duckduckgo has their own XMPP server you can signup for, its what I use for everything. Not sure what extensions it supports (or lack thereof) since I only use it for single user chats.

colanderman 11y ago
Sadly DDG doesn't seem to support using my own identity via SRV records like FastMail does.

simoncion 11y ago

Like brogondwana says, from the commit log on their github repo, it's clear (years after that fastmail blog post) that Process One has abandoned ejabberd 3.x. ejabberd 2.x appears to continue to have updates. [0] Having said that, for my single-account, single-site needs, ejabberd worked just fine for me for the several years between the time that I learned about the fact that Google Talk federated with XMPP servers and the time that Google stopped federating with other XMPP server operators. I can't speak to how comprehensive ejabberd is, but for one-on-one chats, and multi-user chats, it worked just fine when I was using it. [0] https://github.com/processone/ejabberd https://github.com/processone/ejabberd

merijnv 11y ago
> and the time that Google stopped federating with other XMPP server operators. I see this keep getting repeated, but AFAIK there was only like a month long time they temporarily suspended federation for adding new contacts due to a spam issue? I've been talking to people on Google Talk from my (FastMail, sadly) XMPP account for the past year without issue? Am I going crazy?
- simoncion 11y ago
  I remember that roughly around the time Google declared that they were deactivating XMPP federation, I was suddenly unable to make -IIRC- s2s connections between Google Talk and my XMPP server, and message delivery failed 100% of the time. This situation persisted for quite a while (weeks? months?), and I -having noone to talk to- shut down my server. Google might have changed their mind and quietly started federating again. I haven't checked in ages. Guess I have another project to complete this weekend. :)

LeoPanthera 11y ago

I used Prosody. It's pretty simple to setup. You can get free certs from StartSSL to make it secure. I shut off my server just recently, because no-one uses XMPP anymore.

hippich 11y ago

I never tried it, since so far i am using xmpp as a gateway to some service, but sovereign has something related to xmpp - you might want to check it out - https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign