Yes, at one point I ran my own prosody jabber/xmpp server and regularly chatted through it with friends who were gchat users. Even had presence (idle , busy, etc) support! It worked amazingly.
First they killed federation, then they killed xmpp support entirely.
- XMPP clients usually suck in that area, in my opinion.
what do you use for irc? at least irssi and adium do irc and xmpp, i'm sure others do too.
If someone with high profile (GTalk? Facebook Chat?) would build a product based on this protocol, it would boost the adoption tremendously. On the other hand, as I stated a couple of days earlier in another XMPP discussion: As long as Google or Facebook are not supporting federation, they are not really supporting the core feature of XMPP in my book.
huh? google chat does have xmpp federation. i run my own jabber server and talk to a bunch of people that use google chat through the web interface or a jabber client.
I don't use XMPP since the Google talk era, how are the available servers nowadays? Does they support federation, meaning that users from different servers can talk to each other?
Are we talking about the same thing? XMPP federation? If I've got an account on jabber.org or run ejabberd on my domain, I can add you@yourGAppsDomain.com as buddy, see your presence and can message you, without caring about the server your account is local to?
Yeah I remember this! I used to use it with pidgin, as I mentioned in another comment on this thread.
Google talk used to use xmpp as well back in the good old days, and there's maybe even some more!
It'd be nice if open source projects where to culturally make it a norm to use xmpp instead of slack, discord, and the like, sort of how everything used to be run over IRC in the even better old days!
Although most of my friends prefer Matrix these days, XMPP is still my favorite way of chatting. You can easily run your own Prosody instance [1] on a $5/month VPS and have a very modern chat experience - offline messages, syncing between devices, OMEMO end-to-end encryption, group chats, push notifications, HTTP file upload, etc. My wife and I use it for all our communications.
There are some great clients for Android [2], iOS [3] and Linux/Windows [4] that support all the modern XEPs. Sadly, there aren't any mature, actively developed clients for OS X that I've found. Adium is pretty much abandoned. Monal is in active development though and seems promising.
It's so nice to use an open protocol with native clients. Most other self-hosted chat solutions require electron apps, which can be painful to use unless you have top of the line hardware.
Isn't XMPP the base of all major chat services?
I used my own client (Psi+) for a while with Facebook chat but since I no longer use Facebook I don't know if that still works. Too bad none of them support federation any longer.
Google Talk/Hangouts still uses XMPP and I use that right now.
XMPP was actually fairly successful. It was just embraced, extended, and extinguished by the major companies that provided services using it. Google, Facebook, and Atlassian all used XMPP for their chat clients. You could freely interact with all of their chat solutions using XMPP clients. XMPP support for each one of them went away one by one.
The environment outside of major providers was (it definitely is) kind of janky. If you can set up a server application it's not hard but it's not exactly easy to get started, or get people on it without handholding (from my own experience).
You got my upvote and I stated elsewhere in this thread that I'm currently upgrading my xmpp server (to the unreleased 0.10 version of prosody).
But let's be honest: xmpp is still not there. To have something comparable to what these clients offer you need a good number of extensions, notably (ymmv)
- Message carbons (i.e. a message reaches all online devices)
- Stream management (because without it, people are going to consider xmpp broken. "It loses my messages")
- MAM (for shared archives between clients/devices, the reason for me upgrading to an unstable server now)
Given that one of these isn't even (widely) available so far, I'd say xmpp is in a bad position. I love the idea. But it's hard to imagine that it can gain traction right now, given that the 'only' thing it has to offer against all the other systems is federation. I care about that. But .. most don't.
There’s a good many public XMPP servers, or you could run one for yourself and your friends (I recommend Prosody, it works pretty much out of the box for that use case). If they have any XMPP client on any server, you can talk to them.
Jabber core protocol (XMPP) is kinda like SMTP. It deals with transmission of messages between two peers. Just like with SMTP, you can federate servers, so they can exchange messages between each other.
And the similarities don't end here. XMPP doesn't have built-in support for encryption (apart from the basic TLS encryption for the transport layer), it doesn't have support for message archiving and chat history syncing, there is no support for group chats, and so on.
A lot of this functionality is added as extensions (e.g. group chats are XEP-045), but this simply caused a lot of fragmentation in the ecosystem. So you could never rely on your client (or server) interoperating with other clients properly.
Audio calls and video also never really worked well. Google tried to push them by releasing libjingle in 2006 (!!!) but it was kinda ignored by everyone.
Google wave only used XMPP for federation. It was a nightmare to deploy and we never got it working reliably. Different jabber servers all had different quirks or implemented subsets of the XMPP extension spec.
The client-server protocol was simply JSON. XMPP was not involved. (Well, we translated protobuf messages to JSON, so it was ugly JSON, but still JSON).
First they killed federation, then they killed xmpp support entirely.
reply