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Comment by omginternets | Hacker News Reader

I recently started looking into XMPP again a few days ago. I have a few ideas for projects built on top thereof.

Can anybody recommend XMPP servers? I know duckduckgo has an XMPP service up and running, but I can't seem to find any relevant API documentation. All I found was this [0], which doesn't go into details about encryption settings and isn't very useful for programmatic interaction.

[0] https://duck.co/blog/post/2/using-pidgin-with-xmpp-jabber

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I use prosody and it's really slick.

Extensions that implement server-side XEPs are really easy to add on as well. Just git pull the community XEP repo and then add a line to the ini and you can add more superpowers. I have it on a cheap VPS. I'm using conversations with it and it has been mostly flawless. Now I just need a good linux application that understands OMEMO. There's a Gajim hack, but it's kind of messy.

[0]: https://prosody.im/

Conversations.im has made great progress in making XMPP usable on mobile devices, although its services don't seem ready for public adoption quite yet. There are very few XMPP servers which support the XEPs Conversations does so while federation is theoretically possible, it is not yet a reality.

https://account.conversations.im/

Thanks. I can't really justify using a paid XMPP service, though. I was hoping for something indefinitely free.

(Maybe I should look into running my own server...)

If you only need voice + video, Ostel has been running for a few years.

https://ostel.co/

You do not need an account at conversations.im – the app works without it.

Ah, okay. I misunderstood. Cool!

Yep. In addition to that, it’s also FOSS¹ and you aren’t limited to only getting it from the Google Play Store; it’s also distributed² on F-Droid³ too. One thing to note though is that the version of Conversations on F-Droid doesn’t support push notifications, since that functionality uses Google Cloud Notifications.

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¹ — https://github.com/siacs/Conversations

² — https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=eu.siacs.convers...

³ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-Droid

The new extensions are all public and supported by the two main server implementations, prosody and ejabberd. You can nicely ask your server operator to enable them.

See also zom.im - wraps up otr and xmpp in a package along with boatload of cuteness - and is FOSS:

https://github.com/zom/Zom-Android

I used ejabberd (https://www.ejabberd.im/) and it was fairly easy to get up and running and make minor tweaks like logging conversations, but I can't say about encryption but it seems to have it from cursory web searching. It's Erlang so that was an interesting learning hurdle.

I'm a big fan of jabber.at; it should support most modern XMPP features. Dukgo is notorious for not supporting new features and having large ammounts of downtime, I would not recommend it.

Openfire is actively developed. https://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/

I used tigase server and tried building an open source messaging client that you can use to chat as well as share your realtime location with your friends and groups : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.getintouch....

Never took off in developed world but I strangely got plenty of users in Iran & middle east

Consider looking at matrix.org and vector.im as an alternative that won't make your eyes bleed from the Xcessive nature of XMPP.

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