this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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Or good old XMPP!
XMPP doesn't support modern features and the protocol is older than some of the people here
Define "modern features"?
HTTP is old too, what's your point? It get's constant updates via XEPS, and currently runs: WhatsApp, Messenger, Zoom, iMessage, and more. It's perfectly capable. And offers federation out of the box.
The single reason XMPP died off in the tech crowd is that Signal killed it.
I was wondering about that the other day. Why did Jabber/xmpp not evolve further into the mainstream? For a while there were multiple good-enough clients and running ejabberd was not very difficult. I thought it would become ubiquitous (and in a way it has, just not interoperable), and the clients would evolve to become great. Instead it feels like the whole ecosystem kinda just faded away.
I remember why we switched away from Jabber (running ejabberd) in our company: the biggest issue was no server-side history, so using multiple clients on multiple devices was basically impossible, just like MUCs without history to browse and search were useless for our use cases. Has that gotten better over the last 10 years?
We switched to self-hosted Rocketchat, so which sucks in many, many ways but feature-wise it offers everything we were missing from xmpp.
Prosody is also a great server with a ton of functionality.
For the tech crowd I think Signal was just very enticing as it was easy to convert non techies with smart phones. That's the discovery arguement, but I find that point moot since a properly configured setup should allow one to use the same address as ones email address for XMPP (much like gtalk). Now signal claimed to have social graph anonimity, but for the longest time that was not true at all for a state sponsored adversary (it has technically improved but I'm not 100% sure that is true in practice).
There is a XEP for server side history, it's been around since 2012: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html