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Public XMPP Server Directory

xmpp.net

48 pointstshtf24 comments

I've been running my own XMPP server for years, with federation enabled. A few years ago, it seemed like the logical successor to AIM and MSN and all those other walled garden IM systems. And how easy! My XMPP "name" was the same as my email address. One less thing to put on my business card.

But since then, I have realised a big problem with it - no-one uses it! Today I communicate with the world by iMessage, SMS, Twitter, and email. "Instant messaging" just seems to have died as a concept entirely, replaced by yet more walled gardens like Snapchat.

My XMPP server is being turned off for good, next week.

SMS is at least federated. Unfortunately nobody cares about federation anyway: https://medium.com/message/its-kind-of-cheesy-being-green-2c...

The situation is hopeless.

I ran my own xmpp server for a long time as well. Once gmail stopped federating xmpp (hangouts "upgrade"), most of my contacts just...went dark -- they still showed as online, but they never got messages anymore. The few contacts who also ran their own servers, or used a public one, eventually gave up and stopped using it too, probably because most of their friends were on gmail too.

So yeah. I think xmpp is pretty much dead, and google killed it. Oddly, irc still lives on!

Good to know someone else experienced this. Federation with new Hangouts may not be completely dead -- see my sibling comment if you're interested -- but they crippled it so bad, it may as well be. It's such weird behavior that I almost wonder if it's an accidental regression, as I don't why they'd bother to have it almost-work like that.

I've also been running my own federated XMPP server for a few years. To my dismay I discovered about a month ago, that a Gmail user on the "new Hangouts UI" never saw me as online. I could send them messages but they just got dumped into an "email"-looking message within Gmail, which I don't think even registered as unread. You'd have to go looking to find it at all. I think they could send me messages, but why would they if I never appear to be online? If the Gmail user reverted to the "old chat", things seemed to work as expected. They're nice enough to let you toggle between them for now, but my friend said only the new interface allows free SMSing or something.

Don't take my word too heavily, as this was just what I saw in a quick test with one Gmail account of my own. But I decided if Google is going to basically hellban me, and since almost all of my contacts are on Gmail anyway, I'd just transition to a Gmail account to talk to them. I only have one contact that's not on Gmail, and it's an acquaintance I'll probably not talk to again. Maybe I'll keep the server running just for decentralized geek-cred. At least Google is nice enough to let me use a desktop client, for now.

I also noticed Google doesn't seem to support encryption on federated chats. I guess the proper solution is something like OTR anyway, but that was disappointing to see.

Google turned off XMPP federation ages ago, as far as I know.

Why no one created a transport for hangouts? This is how XMPP conquered msn, aol, yim and others, and could once again become popular.

Is communication with hangouts much harder?

Hard isn't the right word - it seems to not currently be officially possible. There is no documented interface for communication with users on Hangouts. Not even XMPP is supposed to work, though I and some other users are still able to use it.

The only API available is for building applications that interact with the existing Hangouts UI.

AIM (OSCAR) was never officially possible either. Reverse engineering has a long history in IM clients.

> Don't take my word too heavily, as this was just what I saw in a quick test with one Gmail account of my own.

XMPP support with Hangouts is currently very, very weird. Even though they shut down the old Google Talk service, and they say everywhere that Hangouts and XMPP don't mix, I'm still able to sign in to the service using XMPP (via Pidgin) and communicate with other Gmail users. No federation here, just directly signing in.

I'm waiting for it to eventually just stop working, just as MSN kept their servers alive for a while after their formal end of support announcement and the Skype transition...

Keep it on! I'll talk to you! Let's keep fighting the good fight. I just setup my XMPP server a few months back.

The whole situation is irritating. Federated XMPP is technically the solution.

However, it's in the best interest of Google, Apple, Facebook, WhatsApp etc to intentionally fragment chat, at the expense of every internet user. It's short sighted in the long run.

I still keep my server on. There are only a handful of contacts left, but it's mostly out of stubbornness. I hope it comes back around eventually.

XMPP is dead. The only people you can reach over XMPP are technically minded people and you can already reach more of them via IRC. XMPP didn't manage to spread. It's over.

Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp and Weechat use XMPP. I wouldn't say it is dead.

Facebook Messenger deprecated XMPP support: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat Whatsapp is built using XMPP, but only as a basis. They don't want you to use it with anything but their official clients. I don't know enough about wechat.

All of them never had federation support

They deprecated the API for 3rd party developers. That doesn't mean they don't use it anymore.

Facebook frequently deprecates APIs without providing any kind of replacement when they feel that 3rd parties abuse the APIs too much for advertisements.

The Facebook Chat XMPP gateway was shut down long ago. Facebook Messenger uses the MQTT protocol, rather than XMPP.

I think you may feel this as you don't see all the organisations that use XMPP internally for their office communications and video conferencing. We use it internally, we have rooms for each department and some group rooms that are very active - when a new person starts with us they often comment how good it is to have a functional internal chat system. We have OTR encryption for confidential exchanges such as providing users with passwords and developers with SQL from databases etc...

Would you mind sharing which XMPP client do you use?

Yeah we use Adium which we've found to be fantastic especially when paired with the OTR plugin.

Thanks!

Cisco apparently didn't get the message, as their unified communications runs on XMPP. And I believe their share of the communications market segment is large enough to consider XMPP anything but dead.

Plenty of places use XMPP, they just end up running it over some proprietary transport protocol so it doesn't interoperate with anything else. Federated XMPP on the other hand is dead with its eulogy delivered by Google.

Situation with instant messaging is still a huge mess. Especially with Google deserting XMPP efforts. I lost majority of my contacts after this Hangouts fiasco. Everyone should thank Eric Schmidt for this.

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