13 ms·

Running My Own XMPP Server

236 points by speckx 9mo ago

skerit 9mo ago
> Most of my contacts made the switch, and I’m now at roughly 95% Signal for day-to-day conversations Years ago, I set up a Matrix server. I got some people to migrate, but ultimately even my husband stopped using it because the UI and accessibility of all the applications was so poor (and he has very bad eyesight, so this was a dealbreaker) Looking for another alternative, I ended up with Telegram. It was pretty open, easy to work with, had great UI and even a ton of funny stickers and emojis, so I got nearly all my friends to migrate. I did NOT go for Signal because I do not need end-to-end encryption all the time, and having all the same conversations available on my desktop as well as on my phone was important, and still is. Unfortunately, it's also run by a severe weirdo. So yeah, I'm not really sure what to use now.
- Arathorn 9mo ago
  On the Matrix accessibility side, Element X has improved loads over the years - https://element.io/blog/helping-to-get-everyone-in-their-element/ https://element.io/blog/helping-to-get-everyone-in-their-ele... and https://element.io/blog/element-is-accessible-by-design/ https://element.io/blog/element-is-accessible-by-design/ etc.
- simgt 9mo ago
  Recently came across FluffyChat (https://fluffy.chat/ https://fluffy.chat/), which works on matrix and has funny stickers and emojis ;)
  - WD-42 9mo ago
    I've been using fluffychat for over a year. It's a nice interface and the client I used to convince less technical friends and family to give Matrix a try. Unfortunately major functionality like being able to send images becomes broken for long periods of time https://github.com/krille-chan/fluffychat/issues/2497 https://github.com/krille-chan/fluffychat/issues/2497
  - fuglede_ 9mo ago
    And for desktop apps, Cinny has custom emoji/sticker support. Would be nice if they played better with Element though.
  - ezst 9mo ago
    Matrix has gotten to a complexity threshold that makes it near-impossible to have independent client/server implementations. Element is terrible, and many contenders are better in a way or another, but all lack some essential feature to turn them into practical alternatives.
    - ptman 9mo ago
      There are several independent clients and servers. None of them support all features, not even synapse/element. But most keep improving steadily.
- Ar-Curunir 9mo ago
  Signal supports desktop clients now, no?
  - jeroenhd 9mo ago
    Has done for years now, but its desktop support is far inferior to even Matrix chat clients. It works in a pinch but you have to lower your standards quite a lot to use it as a true alternative.
  - toastal 9mo ago
    How are you framing this? It’s an Electron app so it exists but doesn’t integrate or perform great. Last I recall you still were required to provide a SIM to sign up & you needed an iOS or Android primary device to even use the desktop client. Can you use a standalone, fast desktop application like you can these other protocols? I would say no, so “support” has shades of gray to it. This is how I got kicked off LINE… they had a Chromium app that I could use tethered to an app, they disabled support for LINE Lite (which had light/dark theme, E2EE, texting, voice/video calls, debatable trackers (Firebase), even stickers & sending a location @ 8MiB instead of 200MiB+ of the “heavy app”), I refused to “upgrade” as it was a downgrade to me, & since I was no longer registered with a “primary” device, I was booted from the network. I don’t think I want these mobile-duopoly-required apps to be my primary means of communication with folks—especially now that my primary phone isn’t Apple or Google (luckily Open Whisper lets WhisperFish exist).
    - simgoh 9mo ago
      > but doesn’t integrate or perform great. Curious what you mean by this. I use the Signal Desktop app. It does what it's supposed to - send and receive messages in a timely way with no lag. What poor performance are you seeing? What doesn't integrate?
      - DaSHacka 9mo ago
        Not GP but I've also had issues with the Signal Desktop app (installed from the Arch repos). Its overall a little sluggish in general (like most Electron apps though, in fairness) and occasionally clicking and dragging images onto the application will cause it to freeze and eventually crash. Plus, the general usability issues present in all variants of the signal client (like no easy way of restoring previous messages on a new device). It's not terrible or anything, but it's just a solid 6/10 application. I personally wish they were more open to 3rd party clients, so I could have something that integrates with my desktop environment a little better and is snappier, like my Matrix clients.
- Insanity 9mo ago
  Telegram is almost on the opposite end of the spectrum of Matrix & Signal so I wouldn’t really consider it an alternative.
  - pavel_lishin 9mo ago
    How so? I genuinely don't know, despite casually using both.
    - zadikian 9mo ago
      Opposite end in terms of security. Telegram group chats have no E2EE, private messages aren't E2EE by default (you have to initiate it as a "secret" chat), and the encryption itself is home rolled.
      - Insanity 9mo ago
        Yup exactly, their home rolled encryption is problematic in and of itself, but the fact that it lacks E2EE means you shouldn’t even trust it in the first place.
      - akho 9mo ago
        Also opposite in terms of feature-richness.
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
        zadikian 9mo ago
        Yep
      - veverkap 9mo ago
        They do publish https://telegram.org/blog/tdlib https://telegram.org/blog/tdlib so couldn't a client author just do shared key encryption or something?
- next_xibalba 9mo ago
  > Unfortunately, it's also run by a severe weirdo. Marlinspike, Acton, or someone else? Why does this matter?
  - andrewflnr 9mo ago
    I think they're talking about Telegram for that part.
    - fullstop 9mo ago
      Yeah, Durov has some interesting takes on things and often not in a good way.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- HumblyTossed 9mo ago
  Over the years there's been a couple of apps that have tried to use email protocols as the backend for chat. I really wish those had gained popularity - there's a lot of overlap with messaging and email.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 9mo ago
    DeltaChat supposedly does that but I've never tried to interoperate it with email
    - gzread 9mo ago
      Deltachat moved away from email, to their own protocol called chatmail
      - mbirth 9mo ago
        Isn’t that still email/SMTP under the hood - just optimised for fast delivery?
        gzread 9mo ago
        I don't think so, because they're not recommending it to be used with normal email accounts.
        HumblyTossed 9mo ago
        https://github.com/chatmail/core/blob/main/standards.md https://github.com/chatmail/core/blob/main/standards.md
  - ibejoeb 9mo ago
    Isn't that just email then? I mean I guess you could wrap a bubbly UI around it, but you're not getting around the latency and spam. Those seem like dealbreakers to me.
- ezst 9mo ago
  Same, years ago, I set up a Matrix server, because it was advertised as the-new-XMPP (and I had done XMPP as a user, a long time before, and thought it had been quirky enough to warrant a successor protocol). What I found with Matrix was the same terrible experience you describe, so I gave old XMPP a new look, and it's been great and continuously improving since. I sleep much better at night having my whole family using XMPP over a self-hosted ejabberd than I can using Matrix to talk with them (and synapse... Forget using synapse federated).
- Flere-Imsaho 9mo ago
  Telegram is very much more about IRC / Discord public chat rooms, rather than private group chats.
- h4kunamata 9mo ago
  Telegram is the only service I join that as soon I did it so, I received SPAM, added to random groups and you name it. It has to be the worst service out there, better stick with WhatsApp over Telegram period.
iamcalledrob 9mo ago
Hosting chat infrastructure is surprisingly hard, but the real challenges emerge beyond C10K+ scale. So self-hosting federated instances like this is pretty interesting way to scale.
morning-coffee 9mo ago
If the premise contributing to the conclusion to run their own chat service is: > But Signal is still one company running one service. If they shut down tomorrow or change direction, I’m back to square one. Aren't they in the same boat now with Cloudflare and Let's Encrypt?
- frizlab 9mo ago
  Yes, probably but they are “easily” replaced. More easily than Signal in any case. Also if we go down this road, we’re all depending on our internet access provider at the very least too! At some point we gotta know when to stop trying to be fully independent from the rest of the world. He chose there.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- yosamino 9mo ago
  Not really. If their own their domain, then it's possible to swap out CF and LE for different companies. That would certainly be a very annoying event, but not an unrecoverable one.
- elric 9mo ago
  There are obviously other CDNs (or whatever Cloudflare considers itself to be these days) and other certificate authorities. They are all interchangeable thanks to open protocols (HTTP, TLS/ACME in this case). Contrasted to Signal: there are no other implementations.
  - ezst 9mo ago
    Re: Signal, it's even worse: they are openly opposed to federation and to letting alternative clients use their server. They demand control and obedience, which has always been suspicious-enough to defeat any goodwill effort on their side. Why would I have/want to trust them when XMPP is a viable federated alternative?
seba_dos1 9mo ago
I've been hosting a ejabberd instance for a few people for almost a decade now. It just works, takes close to no resources and needs almost no maintenance - just some trivial config checkups when migrating to newer major releases. Around the same time I tried hosting a Matrix server with Synapse, but quickly stopped. It consumed a lot of resources when doing almost nothing, and it stopped running after an upgrade with some non-obvious error message, so instead of reanimating it I just abandoned it and moved to matrix.org with my personal account.
- petre 9mo ago
  Ejabberd is a bit overkill for a few people though. Prosody could be easily set up in 15 minutes or less. Also the config doesn't break when migrating to new releases.
  - ezst 9mo ago
    For me too, ejabberd is the admin-friendlier/lower-effort one. Being more "monolithic", your calls will work straight out of the box because it ships a turn server properly configured out of the box, manage certificates over ACME for you, etc. Prosody isn't bad but has a reputation of needing attention to be paid to which incompatible modules not to enable together and overall more protocol knowledge. Both will run on a first gen RPi effortlessly.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
slmkbh 9mo ago
Google Talk and Facebook Messenger both used to be XMPP, and I used Pidgin for both, wonderful times...
- frizlab 9mo ago
  I used to use iChat AV, which was amazing (I still miss it).
- singpolyma3 9mo ago
  Facebook had an XMPP compatible bridge for a subset of their chat functions for awhile, but never "was XMPP". WhatsApp OTOH still is a fork of XMPP.
maltris 9mo ago
I ran ejabberd, later prosody for a while. Eventually I stopped because the contacts went away and it was just not easy enough to set up for ordinary people. Sad because the idea of running a federated chat service for your family and them having all their contacts there, is great from a data ownership point of view. Went back to use a mix of WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and Messenger because apparently there is always some people not wanting to use one or the other service, or only using one of them.
- nicoco 9mo ago
  Revive your prosody and set up https://slidge.im/ https://slidge.im/ for Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal. It's not a proper solution I know, but at least you'll keep on using XMPP clients and they'll get better because they will have one more user at least. ;)
WD-42 9mo ago
I’ve been running a matrix server for about 2 years for family. It’s… ok. Clients are bad. Right now nobody on iOS can send images because there is a bug in fluffychat preventing it. Kinda defeats the purpose of a chat for sharing baby pictures. Synapse is a beast. It’s basically taken over my entire VPS. Joining rooms of various FOSS projects has been nice, but honestly I wish they’d all just stick to libera.chat This article makes me wonder why we collectively ditched xmpp for matrix when it seems like the protocol is still miles ahead?
- jamiemallers 9mo ago
  [dead]
  - singpolyma3 9mo ago
    > Two XMPP clients might support completely different feature sets. This is of course true of Matrix as well. Just because you document everything in one place doesn't mean every app will support it all. Or that every app will even want to support it all. If every app were exactly the same there would be no point in having multiple apps, after all. > The network effects of WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage are the real enemy, not protocol design. Absolutely.
  - zadikian 9mo ago
    Don't know if it's still this way, but I had the exact same experience with the XEPs a decade ago. Even message history is an extension, but at least it has broad support. File transfer was much harder to get right. The servers (ejabberd included) also all defaulted to a simpler but less secure config, so I would've appreciated a writeup like this post back then.
- dannersy 9mo ago
  I am genuinely interested in hearing why we collectively ditched XMPP. I would love to hear someone who has been in the weeds on the development or even just following closely. Edit: Seems someone beat me to it with a good reply.
kuon 9mo ago
Give me linux-> mobile voice call and linux-> Linux screen share and I would be happy. Also plugin for gif selector. But other than that, my ejabberd instance has been running for years with no effort.
- yosamino 9mo ago
  > linux-> mobile voice I've been using Dino on Linux to talk to Conversations/Monal with video and it's been working pretty well. Do you have a different experience ?
  - kuon 9mo ago
    I was never able to connect to mobile client from dino. mobile->mobile works fine. I saw a new dino fork that might changes that.
- nicoco 9mo ago
  Web client, but I think movim has GIF picker and screensharing features. It even does multiparty video calls, compatible with dino. Since it's P2P, it does not scale well to a lot of users, but the developer is working on SFU support for larger video calls.
- toastal 9mo ago
  Have you tried the Movim client? https://movim.eu https://movim.eu
yosamino 9mo ago
I've run an XMPP server in various states of professionalism for around 20 years now. From mom's basement all the way to a colocated server with a similar setup that's described in the post. The only caveat I have not been able to solve is hosting an xmpp server for a different domain, like it's possible with email. A client connecting the account joe.doe@example.ORG will find the server it wants to connect to via SRV to be , e.g., xmpp14.example.COM and expect a TLS certificate for "example.ORG" which that server does not have (nor can/should easily get) - which makes sense in a lot of ways, but limits the ways one can offer hosting services. If anyone has creative solutions I'm all ears.
- singpolyma3 9mo ago
  You need a certificate for the domain you are going to serve of course. You can get one with ACME DNS challenges pretty easily (I have my clients set up a CNAME for the _acme-challenge subdomain of their domain).
  - yosamino 9mo ago
    I worded that poorly. Yes, that is of course correct. But that means that your clients have to trust you without technical safeguards, that you will not use this to get for certificates for purposes other than XMPP. Which, in my mind, is a problem if the domain is not used just for XMPP, but lets say for a website as well.
    - Joe_Cool 9mo ago
      You should be able to do that via DNS SRV entries. _xmpp-client._tcp.domain.tld. TTL IN SRV priority weight port target _xmpps-client._tcp.domain.tld. TTL IN SRV priority weight port target example: _xmpp-client._tcp.not-my-domain.com. 3599 IN SRV 5 0 5222 jabber.my-domain.com. You could also build a reverse proxy setup. Then you wouldn't need the keys to the SSL certs. But that is probably overkill to run at your client: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Tech_pages/XEP-0368 https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Tech_pages/XEP-0368 I don't think I have seen a client complain about the cert being for jabber.my-domain.com Which one is giving trouble there? source: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6120 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6120 https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/SRV_Records https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/SRV_Records
koreanguy 9mo ago
[dead]
MYEUHD 9mo ago
Snikket ( https://snikket.org/ https://snikket.org/ ) is an easier way to self-host an XMPP server. It's a pre-configured Prosody server in a docker image, and you can use it with any XMPP client you like. > I still use Signal for most day-to-day conversations and I’m not planning to stop. You can run a Signal-XMPP gateway. See https://slidge.im/ https://slidge.im/ This will allow you to use your Signal account from your XMPP client. Bridging audio / video calls isn't currently possible. But most other feature work across the gateway.
- digiown 9mo ago
  Obvious note but if you run this on anything other than your own computer it nullifies E2EE.
  - Bender 9mo ago
    adding some example context [1] archive.ph for those that cant reach .ru sites, original URL at the top [1] https://archive.ph/4wi5t https://archive.ph/4wi5t
- Semaphor 9mo ago
  > Snikket I once looked into that and it just confuses me, it’s XMPP but requires an invite? And the snikket client only works with snikket servers, yet it’s actually all based on prosody and conversations? Everything about the project has alarms going off for me.
  - Trollmann 9mo ago
    Invite only isn't that unusual for personal/friend&family servers. The author also set that in their prosody config. The snikket client works with many different XMPP servers, why wouldn't it? As you mentioned it's based on Conversations and for iOS on Siskin.
  - MYEUHD 9mo ago
    You're supposed to self-host it (or rent a hosted instance). But rather than having open registration (or creating accounts beforehand and sending the credentials), you generate invites and send them to your contacts. The invites onboard the users to install the app. The Snikket client works with any XMPP server, and the Snikket server works with any XMPP client. The Snikket clients are soft forks of existing clients. The reason of their existence is having consistent branding. In fact, I recommend using Monal as an iOS client instead of the Snikket iOS one. Note: you can set up invites on any regular Prosody / ejabberd server. https://prosody.im/doc/modules/mod_invites https://prosody.im/doc/modules/mod_invites https://docs.ejabberd.im/admin/configuration/modules/#mod_invites https://docs.ejabberd.im/admin/configuration/modules/#mod_in...
digiown 9mo ago
Buried here is the fact that Gajim seems to have had big updates lately. I might just switch back to XMPP from Matrix, as all the matrix clients on Linux suck frankly. Conversations on Android is significantly better than any Matrix client I've used.
- WD-42 9mo ago
  Have you used Fractal? It's not perfect, but it's a Linux client that works better than any other client I've used on mobile.
  - drnick1 9mo ago
    Agreed, I use fractal and a self-hosted server and it works great.
elminjo 9mo ago
I don’t know. The only good solution would be if all messaging apps used the same protocol so everyone could be reached. But right now it is a mess. We can’t even message each other easily. It’s ridiculous. But what am I talking about? We can’t even agree on the same measurement units.
- yosamino 9mo ago
  > The only good solution would be if all messaging apps used the same protocol so everyone could be reached. That's exactly what XMPP was created to solve, an open standard that could be implemented by anyone. For a while it even looked like there was a chance for that to work out. Whatsapp, Google Talk, Cisco Jabber, and some others used to be based on XMPP. Unfortunately it didn't quite pan out that way.
  - zadikian 9mo ago
    Seems like the smartphone revolution was the hardest thing for XMPP. Push notifications and voice chat were both "batteries not included."
toastal 9mo ago
XMPP has been great to run on NixOS… the servers uses so few resources compared to something extremely heavy like Matrix. The Movim client has been wonderful too allowing users to have calls/sharing from chatrooms (MUCs)—supporting a pretty new XEP in the XMPP space—which means there’s no good reason to be on Discord anymore if you care about the freedom/privacy of yourself & your communities.
jszymborski 9mo ago
> OMEMO is built on the same encryption that Signal uses, so I’m comfortable trusting it. I'm not saying that you shouldn't trust OMEMO (we all have our own threat models), but OMEMO and Signal have fewer similarities that people often assume and has some important caveats [0]. [0] https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/ https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- remix2000 9mo ago
  Oh I can't get enough those blog posts written in such confident language that it's easy to filter them out instead of having to realize midway reading how wrong every bold claim they put forward is… :þ
- MattJ100 9mo ago
  Be aware that this post has known issues that the author is not interested in fixing. In their own words (in response to clarifications by one of the OMEMO folk): "I'll make an edit later about the protocol version thing, but I'm not interested in having questions answered. My entire horse in this race is for evangelists to f** off and leave me alone. That's it. That's all I want." [censorship of profanity mine] You won't find this quote in the article with Ctrl+F, it's in the screenshot, where they omitted the original constructive comment by one of the OMEMO contributors that they chose to moderate, which you can find here: https://www.moparisthebest.com/tim-henkes-omemo-response.txt https://www.moparisthebest.com/tim-henkes-omemo-response.txt So, by all means, read the blog post. But just be aware that its ultimate goal was not to be an unbiased accurate technical article.
  - jszymborski 9mo ago
    The post is an opinion piece and not a technical article for sure, but I'm not sure the takeaway from that quote is that the article is inaccurate, but rather they aren't really looking to start a conversation but rather state their opinions. It seems they've made multiple edits where they believe there are inaccuracies. FWIW, I personally think Henke is correct to state that creating "...a product based on XMPP+OMEMO that, exactly like Signal, can only communicate with other Signal users and always has encryption on." would largely address most of the critiques (or at least the ones that bother me most), but that Soatok is also correct in concluding that the XMPP ecosystem and the way OMEMO is used in clients today does not meet their definition of "Signal competitor"[0], which I think is still a useful way to frame things. [0] https://soatok.blog/2024/07/31/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-signal-competitor/ https://soatok.blog/2024/07/31/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-sig...
rascallbee 9mo ago
I went all in on xmpp to replace my traditional cell communications (text and calls) about a year ago, using Snikket on a VPS for the server, jmp.chat for an phone->xmpp gateway service, and a data-only esim for connectivity. From my experience the biggest pain point gets the least amount of discussion in this post and that is the client landscape. I'm on iOS so I tried Monal and Siskin IM as my primary mobile clients and Movim/Dino as my desktop clients. While I truly appreciate the effort the maintainers put into these tools I have to admit that the UX for Moanl and Siskin IM leave a lot to be desired and if you're used to something like Whatsapp or Signal it will prove a significant barrier to convincing friends and family to adopt your new platform. I frequently encountered UI bugs and missing features using the iOS clients and for the life of me could never get notifications working reliably on mobile (a constant bug bear for users in the Siskin and Snikket user base). For calls and texts on mobile, I don't think I ever managed to get a reliable notification unless the application was open on the screen on iOS. This meant that I frequently missed important calls or texts when out and about. On the desktop, Dino did manage to at least always alert me when a call or a text came through, but answering the calls on was always hit or miss on my laptop for reasons that allude me. Interestingly the most full featured and reliable client turned out to be movim, which has the caveat of being a full featured formum/social network with an xmpp client embedded. On movim I would reliably get notifications for calls and texts and could "answer" calls in any browser connected to a microphone easily. Another thing to note if you're looking to replace your phone service is that 3G/LTE radio is very tolerant to maintaining a reliable connection on the move, jumping between cell towers. The same cannot be said for an XMPP based call, and you will encounter significant latency and drop outs trying to hold a conversation driving or on transit. I eventually gave up on the venture after missing a few too many important notifications, but if I was to go defiantly go all in again I think I would focus on self hosting a movim instance as my base "client", as it was the most reliable and easy to use of all the ones I tried. For mobile, I did hear good things about Conversations on Android but never got around to trying that one.
- MattJ100 9mo ago
  Yeah, iOS is definitely a weaker spot and we're aware of it. Monal is currently working on an overhaul of their UI (they have a grant allocated for it: https://nlnet.nl/project/Monal-IM-UI/ https://nlnet.nl/project/Monal-IM-UI/ ). There is also a new app in the works between Cheogram and Snikket. There is a beta available, but it's still young (and we won't apply any Snikket branding until E2EE is complete). Thanks for sharing your experience!
kkfx 9mo ago
I've very recently try on my NixOS homeserver both Matrix and XMPP, with the target of having family/few friends own video-calls with chats aside mostly meant as shared scrap of text more than real chats to waste time on them. Something like "remember the milk" than else. The experience was unpleasant in both cases; in the end, I have a working setup for both, relatively working at least, but what's really missing is a single application, something you can 'go install', 'pip install', or 'cargo build', also easy for distro packagers, that features: - a text-based configuration - an admin WebUI (for eventual storage cleanup, moderation etc) - a client WebUI for users including: - text chat with optional file uploads - audio/video chat - other bits on the side like long-form notes Nostr-style for a blog with comments under articles etc (yes, it's connected, it's just plain textual communication). The core of it is just a simple snippet of text, we can transmit to some privately, or to anyone openly, and in that sense, Nostr has got it spot on: you can do chats, emails, blog posts, because everything is just a bit of text rendered with any attached media. Unfortunately, as it stands, Nostr feels like an ecosystem that lacks a clear direction; XMPP seems to be largely abandoned, with enough complexity to put most people off; Matrix looks to be heading towards a commercial future riddled with issues that keep most people away, and in the end, we don't have much. Hosting BBB or Jitsi is even worse. Hosting Asterisk or Yate to use with softphones or classic VoIP desk phones is also problematic. There's a lot going on under the bonnet now, but why an app hasn't emerged yet that brings together features we've more or less had for decades is a bit of a mystery to me. It almost feels intentional, as if it's designed to deny free communication to the masses by making life difficult on purpose.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Western0 9mo ago
And still You have centalize system why not tox
grabshot_dev 9mo ago
Great writeup. I went through a very similar journey. Signal as the "good enough" default, then gradually wanting to own the whole stack. The bit about smacks and cloud_notify being essential for mobile is spot on, that was the part I always underestimated in past XMPP attempts. Without those two modules the experience is terrible on phones and it's no wonder people bounced off it. One thing I'd add: if you're already running Caddy as your reverse proxy, you can use its on_demand TLS to handle certificates for the upload and conference subdomains automatically instead of managing them through certbot separately. Saves a moving part. Curious how federation has been in practice. Are you actually messaging people on other servers, or is it mostly just you and contacts you've created accounts for?
raphaelmolly8 9mo ago
[dead]
b8 9mo ago
I grew up using XMPP (I'm 25), but today I use Briar and Signal. I use text and calls for my family, because no one else but me uses Signal so it's unfair for them to use one app to talk to me and no one else.
clarabennett26 9mo ago
[dead]
bovermyer 9mo ago
So, I have an XMPP account, but no one to talk to. How do you find people who use it?
- ezst 9mo ago
  There's a room index at: https://search.jabber.network/ https://search.jabber.network/
- zadikian 9mo ago
  I was kinda hoping someone in this thread would post their server they made using this tutorial.
daneel_w 9mo ago
I recommend that you also support implicit TLS for both client-to-server and server-to-server connections, instead of just STARTTLS. That'd be the "c2s_direct_tls_ports" and "s2s_direct_tls_ports" directives, on port 5223 and 5270 respectively. These should go into your SRV records, too. Also consider enabling SASL2.
pwndByDeath 9mo ago
For me the issue with the discord/signal/ telegram is they are all dependent on a 3rd party that could flip or disappear at any moment, to say nothing of the trust me bro privacy. On the other hand, email is an example of a communication system that would persist if the major supporters dropped out,but then self hosting email is a nightmare. Xmpp is better, but you still need DNS and TLS cents to participate. There are some interesting reimagined network options that seem like they could break this. My current favorite being RNS and LXMF
krc0 9mo ago
[dead]
crk03 9mo ago
[dead]
bmenrigh 9mo ago
I ran my own XMPP server for about 15 years. Then 10(?) years ago Google's GChat migrated away from XMPP. I never had another XMPP conversation with anyone from that point on. I finally turned the XMMP daemon off off about 2 years ago to reduce my attack surface.
- bmenrigh 9mo ago
  I should add that I have a group of friends that only chat on "C", for C in: * SMS * Apple iMessage * Email * IRC * Facebook Messenger * Telegram * Slack * Webex Teams * Discord * Twitter (DMs) * Signal * Whatsapp * A particular PHPBB web forum Instead of being on top of all of these, I mostly neglect all of them, and then friends complain that they haven't been able to get a hold of me for 6 months. XMPP was my own "solution" to this problem, which nobody else used.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 9mo ago
These people talking about running these (to civilians in 2026) esoteric IM servers for “family” or “friends” all just sound so deranged for me. I can’t possibly imagine thinning that it’s remotely a good idea to subject anyone I don’t explicitly know ‘through computers’ to such lunacy.

236 points by speckx 9mo ago

> Most of my contacts made the switch, and I’m now at roughly 95% Signal for day-to-day conversations Years ago, I set up a Matrix server. I got some people to migrate, but ultimately even my husband stopped using it because the UI and accessibility of all the applications was so poor (and he has very bad eyesight, so this was a dealbreaker) Looking for another alternative, I ended up with Telegram. It was pretty open, easy to work with, had great UI and even a ton of funny stickers and emojis, so I got nearly all my friends to migrate. I did NOT go for Signal because I do not need end-to-end encryption all the time, and having all the same conversations available on my desktop as well as on my phone was important, and still is. Unfortunately, it's also run by a severe weirdo. So yeah, I'm not really sure what to use now.

Arathorn 9mo ago
On the Matrix accessibility side, Element X has improved loads over the years - https://element.io/blog/helping-to-get-everyone-in-their-element/ https://element.io/blog/helping-to-get-everyone-in-their-ele... and https://element.io/blog/element-is-accessible-by-design/ https://element.io/blog/element-is-accessible-by-design/ etc.
simgt 9mo ago
Recently came across FluffyChat (https://fluffy.chat/ https://fluffy.chat/), which works on matrix and has funny stickers and emojis ;)
- WD-42 9mo ago
  I've been using fluffychat for over a year. It's a nice interface and the client I used to convince less technical friends and family to give Matrix a try. Unfortunately major functionality like being able to send images becomes broken for long periods of time https://github.com/krille-chan/fluffychat/issues/2497 https://github.com/krille-chan/fluffychat/issues/2497
- fuglede_ 9mo ago
  And for desktop apps, Cinny has custom emoji/sticker support. Would be nice if they played better with Element though.
- ezst 9mo ago
  Matrix has gotten to a complexity threshold that makes it near-impossible to have independent client/server implementations. Element is terrible, and many contenders are better in a way or another, but all lack some essential feature to turn them into practical alternatives.
  - ptman 9mo ago
    There are several independent clients and servers. None of them support all features, not even synapse/element. But most keep improving steadily.
Ar-Curunir 9mo ago
Signal supports desktop clients now, no?
- jeroenhd 9mo ago
  Has done for years now, but its desktop support is far inferior to even Matrix chat clients. It works in a pinch but you have to lower your standards quite a lot to use it as a true alternative.
- toastal 9mo ago
  How are you framing this? It’s an Electron app so it exists but doesn’t integrate or perform great. Last I recall you still were required to provide a SIM to sign up & you needed an iOS or Android primary device to even use the desktop client. Can you use a standalone, fast desktop application like you can these other protocols? I would say no, so “support” has shades of gray to it. This is how I got kicked off LINE… they had a Chromium app that I could use tethered to an app, they disabled support for LINE Lite (which had light/dark theme, E2EE, texting, voice/video calls, debatable trackers (Firebase), even stickers & sending a location @ 8MiB instead of 200MiB+ of the “heavy app”), I refused to “upgrade” as it was a downgrade to me, & since I was no longer registered with a “primary” device, I was booted from the network. I don’t think I want these mobile-duopoly-required apps to be my primary means of communication with folks—especially now that my primary phone isn’t Apple or Google (luckily Open Whisper lets WhisperFish exist).
  - simgoh 9mo ago
    > but doesn’t integrate or perform great. Curious what you mean by this. I use the Signal Desktop app. It does what it's supposed to - send and receive messages in a timely way with no lag. What poor performance are you seeing? What doesn't integrate?
    - DaSHacka 9mo ago
      Not GP but I've also had issues with the Signal Desktop app (installed from the Arch repos). Its overall a little sluggish in general (like most Electron apps though, in fairness) and occasionally clicking and dragging images onto the application will cause it to freeze and eventually crash. Plus, the general usability issues present in all variants of the signal client (like no easy way of restoring previous messages on a new device). It's not terrible or anything, but it's just a solid 6/10 application. I personally wish they were more open to 3rd party clients, so I could have something that integrates with my desktop environment a little better and is snappier, like my Matrix clients.
Insanity 9mo ago
Telegram is almost on the opposite end of the spectrum of Matrix & Signal so I wouldn’t really consider it an alternative.
- pavel_lishin 9mo ago
  How so? I genuinely don't know, despite casually using both.
  - zadikian 9mo ago
    Opposite end in terms of security. Telegram group chats have no E2EE, private messages aren't E2EE by default (you have to initiate it as a "secret" chat), and the encryption itself is home rolled.
    - Insanity 9mo ago
      Yup exactly, their home rolled encryption is problematic in and of itself, but the fact that it lacks E2EE means you shouldn’t even trust it in the first place.
    - akho 9mo ago
      Also opposite in terms of feature-richness.
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      - zadikian 9mo ago
        Yep
    - veverkap 9mo ago
      They do publish https://telegram.org/blog/tdlib https://telegram.org/blog/tdlib so couldn't a client author just do shared key encryption or something?
next_xibalba 9mo ago
> Unfortunately, it's also run by a severe weirdo. Marlinspike, Acton, or someone else? Why does this matter?
- andrewflnr 9mo ago
  I think they're talking about Telegram for that part.
  - fullstop 9mo ago
    Yeah, Durov has some interesting takes on things and often not in a good way.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
HumblyTossed 9mo ago
Over the years there's been a couple of apps that have tried to use email protocols as the backend for chat. I really wish those had gained popularity - there's a lot of overlap with messaging and email.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 9mo ago
  DeltaChat supposedly does that but I've never tried to interoperate it with email
  - gzread 9mo ago
    Deltachat moved away from email, to their own protocol called chatmail
    - mbirth 9mo ago
      Isn’t that still email/SMTP under the hood - just optimised for fast delivery?
      - gzread 9mo ago
        I don't think so, because they're not recommending it to be used with normal email accounts.
        HumblyTossed 9mo ago
        https://github.com/chatmail/core/blob/main/standards.md https://github.com/chatmail/core/blob/main/standards.md
- ibejoeb 9mo ago
  Isn't that just email then? I mean I guess you could wrap a bubbly UI around it, but you're not getting around the latency and spam. Those seem like dealbreakers to me.
ezst 9mo ago
Same, years ago, I set up a Matrix server, because it was advertised as the-new-XMPP (and I had done XMPP as a user, a long time before, and thought it had been quirky enough to warrant a successor protocol). What I found with Matrix was the same terrible experience you describe, so I gave old XMPP a new look, and it's been great and continuously improving since. I sleep much better at night having my whole family using XMPP over a self-hosted ejabberd than I can using Matrix to talk with them (and synapse... Forget using synapse federated).
Flere-Imsaho 9mo ago
Telegram is very much more about IRC / Discord public chat rooms, rather than private group chats.
h4kunamata 9mo ago
Telegram is the only service I join that as soon I did it so, I received SPAM, added to random groups and you name it. It has to be the worst service out there, better stick with WhatsApp over Telegram period.

iamcalledrob 9mo ago

Hosting chat infrastructure is surprisingly hard, but the real challenges emerge beyond C10K+ scale. So self-hosting federated instances like this is pretty interesting way to scale.

morning-coffee 9mo ago

If the premise contributing to the conclusion to run their own chat service is: > But Signal is still one company running one service. If they shut down tomorrow or change direction, I’m back to square one. Aren't they in the same boat now with Cloudflare and Let's Encrypt?

frizlab 9mo ago
Yes, probably but they are “easily” replaced. More easily than Signal in any case. Also if we go down this road, we’re all depending on our internet access provider at the very least too! At some point we gotta know when to stop trying to be fully independent from the rest of the world. He chose there.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
yosamino 9mo ago
Not really. If their own their domain, then it's possible to swap out CF and LE for different companies. That would certainly be a very annoying event, but not an unrecoverable one.
elric 9mo ago
There are obviously other CDNs (or whatever Cloudflare considers itself to be these days) and other certificate authorities. They are all interchangeable thanks to open protocols (HTTP, TLS/ACME in this case). Contrasted to Signal: there are no other implementations.
- ezst 9mo ago
  Re: Signal, it's even worse: they are openly opposed to federation and to letting alternative clients use their server. They demand control and obedience, which has always been suspicious-enough to defeat any goodwill effort on their side. Why would I have/want to trust them when XMPP is a viable federated alternative?

seba_dos1 9mo ago

I've been hosting a ejabberd instance for a few people for almost a decade now. It just works, takes close to no resources and needs almost no maintenance - just some trivial config checkups when migrating to newer major releases. Around the same time I tried hosting a Matrix server with Synapse, but quickly stopped. It consumed a lot of resources when doing almost nothing, and it stopped running after an upgrade with some non-obvious error message, so instead of reanimating it I just abandoned it and moved to matrix.org with my personal account.

petre 9mo ago
Ejabberd is a bit overkill for a few people though. Prosody could be easily set up in 15 minutes or less. Also the config doesn't break when migrating to new releases.
- ezst 9mo ago
  For me too, ejabberd is the admin-friendlier/lower-effort one. Being more "monolithic", your calls will work straight out of the box because it ships a turn server properly configured out of the box, manage certificates over ACME for you, etc. Prosody isn't bad but has a reputation of needing attention to be paid to which incompatible modules not to enable together and overall more protocol knowledge. Both will run on a first gen RPi effortlessly.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]

slmkbh 9mo ago

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

frizlab 9mo ago
I used to use iChat AV, which was amazing (I still miss it).
singpolyma3 9mo ago
Facebook had an XMPP compatible bridge for a subset of their chat functions for awhile, but never "was XMPP". WhatsApp OTOH still is a fork of XMPP.

maltris 9mo ago

I ran ejabberd, later prosody for a while. Eventually I stopped because the contacts went away and it was just not easy enough to set up for ordinary people. Sad because the idea of running a federated chat service for your family and them having all their contacts there, is great from a data ownership point of view. Went back to use a mix of WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and Messenger because apparently there is always some people not wanting to use one or the other service, or only using one of them.

nicoco 9mo ago
Revive your prosody and set up https://slidge.im/ https://slidge.im/ for Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal. It's not a proper solution I know, but at least you'll keep on using XMPP clients and they'll get better because they will have one more user at least. ;)

WD-42 9mo ago

I’ve been running a matrix server for about 2 years for family. It’s… ok. Clients are bad. Right now nobody on iOS can send images because there is a bug in fluffychat preventing it. Kinda defeats the purpose of a chat for sharing baby pictures. Synapse is a beast. It’s basically taken over my entire VPS. Joining rooms of various FOSS projects has been nice, but honestly I wish they’d all just stick to libera.chat This article makes me wonder why we collectively ditched xmpp for matrix when it seems like the protocol is still miles ahead?

jamiemallers 9mo ago
[dead]
- singpolyma3 9mo ago
  > Two XMPP clients might support completely different feature sets. This is of course true of Matrix as well. Just because you document everything in one place doesn't mean every app will support it all. Or that every app will even want to support it all. If every app were exactly the same there would be no point in having multiple apps, after all. > The network effects of WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage are the real enemy, not protocol design. Absolutely.
- zadikian 9mo ago
  Don't know if it's still this way, but I had the exact same experience with the XEPs a decade ago. Even message history is an extension, but at least it has broad support. File transfer was much harder to get right. The servers (ejabberd included) also all defaulted to a simpler but less secure config, so I would've appreciated a writeup like this post back then.
dannersy 9mo ago
I am genuinely interested in hearing why we collectively ditched XMPP. I would love to hear someone who has been in the weeds on the development or even just following closely. Edit: Seems someone beat me to it with a good reply.

kuon 9mo ago

Give me linux-> mobile voice call and linux-> Linux screen share and I would be happy. Also plugin for gif selector. But other than that, my ejabberd instance has been running for years with no effort.

yosamino 9mo ago
> linux-> mobile voice I've been using Dino on Linux to talk to Conversations/Monal with video and it's been working pretty well. Do you have a different experience ?
- kuon 9mo ago
  I was never able to connect to mobile client from dino. mobile->mobile works fine. I saw a new dino fork that might changes that.
nicoco 9mo ago
Web client, but I think movim has GIF picker and screensharing features. It even does multiparty video calls, compatible with dino. Since it's P2P, it does not scale well to a lot of users, but the developer is working on SFU support for larger video calls.
toastal 9mo ago
Have you tried the Movim client? https://movim.eu https://movim.eu

yosamino 9mo ago

I've run an XMPP server in various states of professionalism for around 20 years now. From mom's basement all the way to a colocated server with a similar setup that's described in the post. The only caveat I have not been able to solve is hosting an xmpp server for a different domain, like it's possible with email. A client connecting the account joe.doe@example.ORG will find the server it wants to connect to via SRV to be , e.g., xmpp14.example.COM and expect a TLS certificate for "example.ORG" which that server does not have (nor can/should easily get) - which makes sense in a lot of ways, but limits the ways one can offer hosting services. If anyone has creative solutions I'm all ears.

singpolyma3 9mo ago
You need a certificate for the domain you are going to serve of course. You can get one with ACME DNS challenges pretty easily (I have my clients set up a CNAME for the _acme-challenge subdomain of their domain).
- yosamino 9mo ago
  I worded that poorly. Yes, that is of course correct. But that means that your clients have to trust you without technical safeguards, that you will not use this to get for certificates for purposes other than XMPP. Which, in my mind, is a problem if the domain is not used just for XMPP, but lets say for a website as well.
  - Joe_Cool 9mo ago
    You should be able to do that via DNS SRV entries. _xmpp-client._tcp.domain.tld. TTL IN SRV priority weight port target _xmpps-client._tcp.domain.tld. TTL IN SRV priority weight port target example: _xmpp-client._tcp.not-my-domain.com. 3599 IN SRV 5 0 5222 jabber.my-domain.com. You could also build a reverse proxy setup. Then you wouldn't need the keys to the SSL certs. But that is probably overkill to run at your client: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Tech_pages/XEP-0368 https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Tech_pages/XEP-0368 I don't think I have seen a client complain about the cert being for jabber.my-domain.com Which one is giving trouble there? source: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6120 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6120 https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/SRV_Records https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/SRV_Records

koreanguy 9mo ago

[dead]

MYEUHD 9mo ago

Snikket ( https://snikket.org/ https://snikket.org/ ) is an easier way to self-host an XMPP server. It's a pre-configured Prosody server in a docker image, and you can use it with any XMPP client you like. > I still use Signal for most day-to-day conversations and I’m not planning to stop. You can run a Signal-XMPP gateway. See https://slidge.im/ https://slidge.im/ This will allow you to use your Signal account from your XMPP client. Bridging audio / video calls isn't currently possible. But most other feature work across the gateway.

digiown 9mo ago
Obvious note but if you run this on anything other than your own computer it nullifies E2EE.
- Bender 9mo ago
  adding some example context [1] archive.ph for those that cant reach .ru sites, original URL at the top [1] https://archive.ph/4wi5t https://archive.ph/4wi5t
Semaphor 9mo ago
> Snikket I once looked into that and it just confuses me, it’s XMPP but requires an invite? And the snikket client only works with snikket servers, yet it’s actually all based on prosody and conversations? Everything about the project has alarms going off for me.
- Trollmann 9mo ago
  Invite only isn't that unusual for personal/friend&family servers. The author also set that in their prosody config. The snikket client works with many different XMPP servers, why wouldn't it? As you mentioned it's based on Conversations and for iOS on Siskin.
- MYEUHD 9mo ago
  You're supposed to self-host it (or rent a hosted instance). But rather than having open registration (or creating accounts beforehand and sending the credentials), you generate invites and send them to your contacts. The invites onboard the users to install the app. The Snikket client works with any XMPP server, and the Snikket server works with any XMPP client. The Snikket clients are soft forks of existing clients. The reason of their existence is having consistent branding. In fact, I recommend using Monal as an iOS client instead of the Snikket iOS one. Note: you can set up invites on any regular Prosody / ejabberd server. https://prosody.im/doc/modules/mod_invites https://prosody.im/doc/modules/mod_invites https://docs.ejabberd.im/admin/configuration/modules/#mod_invites https://docs.ejabberd.im/admin/configuration/modules/#mod_in...

digiown 9mo ago

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

WD-42 9mo ago
Have you used Fractal? It's not perfect, but it's a Linux client that works better than any other client I've used on mobile.
- drnick1 9mo ago
  Agreed, I use fractal and a self-hosted server and it works great.

elminjo 9mo ago

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

yosamino 9mo ago
> The only good solution would be if all messaging apps used the same protocol so everyone could be reached. That's exactly what XMPP was created to solve, an open standard that could be implemented by anyone. For a while it even looked like there was a chance for that to work out. Whatsapp, Google Talk, Cisco Jabber, and some others used to be based on XMPP. Unfortunately it didn't quite pan out that way.
- zadikian 9mo ago
  Seems like the smartphone revolution was the hardest thing for XMPP. Push notifications and voice chat were both "batteries not included."

toastal 9mo ago

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

jszymborski 9mo ago

> OMEMO is built on the same encryption that Signal uses, so I’m comfortable trusting it. I'm not saying that you shouldn't trust OMEMO (we all have our own threat models), but OMEMO and Signal have fewer similarities that people often assume and has some important caveats [0]. [0] https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/ https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
remix2000 9mo ago
Oh I can't get enough those blog posts written in such confident language that it's easy to filter them out instead of having to realize midway reading how wrong every bold claim they put forward is… :þ
MattJ100 9mo ago
Be aware that this post has known issues that the author is not interested in fixing. In their own words (in response to clarifications by one of the OMEMO folk): "I'll make an edit later about the protocol version thing, but I'm not interested in having questions answered. My entire horse in this race is for evangelists to f** off and leave me alone. That's it. That's all I want." [censorship of profanity mine] You won't find this quote in the article with Ctrl+F, it's in the screenshot, where they omitted the original constructive comment by one of the OMEMO contributors that they chose to moderate, which you can find here: https://www.moparisthebest.com/tim-henkes-omemo-response.txt https://www.moparisthebest.com/tim-henkes-omemo-response.txt So, by all means, read the blog post. But just be aware that its ultimate goal was not to be an unbiased accurate technical article.
- jszymborski 9mo ago
  The post is an opinion piece and not a technical article for sure, but I'm not sure the takeaway from that quote is that the article is inaccurate, but rather they aren't really looking to start a conversation but rather state their opinions. It seems they've made multiple edits where they believe there are inaccuracies. FWIW, I personally think Henke is correct to state that creating "...a product based on XMPP+OMEMO that, exactly like Signal, can only communicate with other Signal users and always has encryption on." would largely address most of the critiques (or at least the ones that bother me most), but that Soatok is also correct in concluding that the XMPP ecosystem and the way OMEMO is used in clients today does not meet their definition of "Signal competitor"[0], which I think is still a useful way to frame things. [0] https://soatok.blog/2024/07/31/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-signal-competitor/ https://soatok.blog/2024/07/31/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-sig...

rascallbee 9mo ago

I went all in on xmpp to replace my traditional cell communications (text and calls) about a year ago, using Snikket on a VPS for the server, jmp.chat for an phone->xmpp gateway service, and a data-only esim for connectivity. From my experience the biggest pain point gets the least amount of discussion in this post and that is the client landscape. I'm on iOS so I tried Monal and Siskin IM as my primary mobile clients and Movim/Dino as my desktop clients. While I truly appreciate the effort the maintainers put into these tools I have to admit that the UX for Moanl and Siskin IM leave a lot to be desired and if you're used to something like Whatsapp or Signal it will prove a significant barrier to convincing friends and family to adopt your new platform. I frequently encountered UI bugs and missing features using the iOS clients and for the life of me could never get notifications working reliably on mobile (a constant bug bear for users in the Siskin and Snikket user base). For calls and texts on mobile, I don't think I ever managed to get a reliable notification unless the application was open on the screen on iOS. This meant that I frequently missed important calls or texts when out and about. On the desktop, Dino did manage to at least always alert me when a call or a text came through, but answering the calls on was always hit or miss on my laptop for reasons that allude me. Interestingly the most full featured and reliable client turned out to be movim, which has the caveat of being a full featured formum/social network with an xmpp client embedded. On movim I would reliably get notifications for calls and texts and could "answer" calls in any browser connected to a microphone easily. Another thing to note if you're looking to replace your phone service is that 3G/LTE radio is very tolerant to maintaining a reliable connection on the move, jumping between cell towers. The same cannot be said for an XMPP based call, and you will encounter significant latency and drop outs trying to hold a conversation driving or on transit. I eventually gave up on the venture after missing a few too many important notifications, but if I was to go defiantly go all in again I think I would focus on self hosting a movim instance as my base "client", as it was the most reliable and easy to use of all the ones I tried. For mobile, I did hear good things about Conversations on Android but never got around to trying that one.

MattJ100 9mo ago
Yeah, iOS is definitely a weaker spot and we're aware of it. Monal is currently working on an overhaul of their UI (they have a grant allocated for it: https://nlnet.nl/project/Monal-IM-UI/ https://nlnet.nl/project/Monal-IM-UI/ ). There is also a new app in the works between Cheogram and Snikket. There is a beta available, but it's still young (and we won't apply any Snikket branding until E2EE is complete). Thanks for sharing your experience!

kkfx 9mo ago

I've very recently try on my NixOS homeserver both Matrix and XMPP, with the target of having family/few friends own video-calls with chats aside mostly meant as shared scrap of text more than real chats to waste time on them. Something like "remember the milk" than else. The experience was unpleasant in both cases; in the end, I have a working setup for both, relatively working at least, but what's really missing is a single application, something you can 'go install', 'pip install', or 'cargo build', also easy for distro packagers, that features: - a text-based configuration - an admin WebUI (for eventual storage cleanup, moderation etc) - a client WebUI for users including: - text chat with optional file uploads - audio/video chat - other bits on the side like long-form notes Nostr-style for a blog with comments under articles etc (yes, it's connected, it's just plain textual communication). The core of it is just a simple snippet of text, we can transmit to some privately, or to anyone openly, and in that sense, Nostr has got it spot on: you can do chats, emails, blog posts, because everything is just a bit of text rendered with any attached media. Unfortunately, as it stands, Nostr feels like an ecosystem that lacks a clear direction; XMPP seems to be largely abandoned, with enough complexity to put most people off; Matrix looks to be heading towards a commercial future riddled with issues that keep most people away, and in the end, we don't have much. Hosting BBB or Jitsi is even worse. Hosting Asterisk or Yate to use with softphones or classic VoIP desk phones is also problematic. There's a lot going on under the bonnet now, but why an app hasn't emerged yet that brings together features we've more or less had for decades is a bit of a mystery to me. It almost feels intentional, as if it's designed to deny free communication to the masses by making life difficult on purpose.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

Western0 9mo ago

And still You have centalize system why not tox

grabshot_dev 9mo ago

Great writeup. I went through a very similar journey. Signal as the "good enough" default, then gradually wanting to own the whole stack. The bit about smacks and cloud_notify being essential for mobile is spot on, that was the part I always underestimated in past XMPP attempts. Without those two modules the experience is terrible on phones and it's no wonder people bounced off it. One thing I'd add: if you're already running Caddy as your reverse proxy, you can use its on_demand TLS to handle certificates for the upload and conference subdomains automatically instead of managing them through certbot separately. Saves a moving part. Curious how federation has been in practice. Are you actually messaging people on other servers, or is it mostly just you and contacts you've created accounts for?

raphaelmolly8 9mo ago

[dead]

b8 9mo ago

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

clarabennett26 9mo ago

[dead]

bovermyer 9mo ago

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

ezst 9mo ago
There's a room index at: https://search.jabber.network/ https://search.jabber.network/
zadikian 9mo ago
I was kinda hoping someone in this thread would post their server they made using this tutorial.

daneel_w 9mo ago

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

pwndByDeath 9mo ago

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

krc0 9mo ago

[dead]

crk03 9mo ago

[dead]

bmenrigh 9mo ago

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

bmenrigh 9mo ago
I should add that I have a group of friends that only chat on "C", for C in: * SMS * Apple iMessage * Email * IRC * Facebook Messenger * Telegram * Slack * Webex Teams * Discord * Twitter (DMs) * Signal * Whatsapp * A particular PHPBB web forum Instead of being on top of all of these, I mostly neglect all of them, and then friends complain that they haven't been able to get a hold of me for 6 months. XMPP was my own "solution" to this problem, which nobody else used.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r 9mo ago

These people talking about running these (to civilians in 2026) esoteric IM servers for “family” or “friends” all just sound so deranged for me. I can’t possibly imagine thinning that it’s remotely a good idea to subject anyone I don’t explicitly know ‘through computers’ to such lunacy.