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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Sincere question: is XMPP still widely used anywhere? It seems like Slack etc have eaten the “small” corporate deployments that aren’t big enough for something horrible and enterprisey. For instance, I can’t imagine IBM using Jabber throughout the org.

But I say that full well knowing that I don’t have a lot of experience inside large enterprises, so I’m guessing about things I don’t have evidence of.

So who uses XMPP today, and what’s it used instead of?

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Only used by a few hundred millions persons daily to receive their push notifications: https://xmpp.org/uses/gaming/

And also a few hundred millions gamers worldwide: https://xmpp.org/uses/social/

Ah I almost forgot the tiny market of a few other millions persons using it for chatting: https://xmpp.org/uses/instant-messaging/

But other than that yes XMPP is pretty dead.

I suppose you're trying to answer in good faith, but -to me at least- the problem is that XMPP has always worked beautifully for single-server deployments (or let's say, single organization), i.e. when a game company does their internal chat and absolutely controls not even the client app, but also the client version.

The problems have always been the interaction between different clients, or federation.

So XMPP, the protocol, is quite widespread in use "internally" at dozens of huge deployments.

XMPP as a general chat protocol with people federating and using different clients is basically dead. (Although I suppose it's in a better shape now than 5-8 years ago, maybe Snikket and some other players are managing to give it a more widespread comeback).

Source: Absolutely anecdotal, just a random guy who has used XMPP for work over 10 years ago, ran several own XMPP servers, and who shut it all down because none of the contacts continued using it.

PS: Oh, and if CCP actually still uses XMPP for EVE Online, it's not working very well. The ingame chat goes nuts at least once per week, with "only" 30k people online and most of them separated to channels of probably not more then 5k except in extreme situation.

EvE still does use XMPP for chat and yes, it's still a nightmare if large fleets declare local as primary. It's gotten much better since they moved it to AWS because they were running into bandwidth issues. Come to found out when you use XML as transport, you are sending over a ton of extra characters and at scale, that adds up.

If you know what you're doing, XMPP is as secure and more reliable/efficient than Matrix. Really snappy in comparison. Other messengers build on it (Kik for example but also in enterprises). If you're working in security, chances are you're still on XMPP somewhere. That being said, the protocol with its extensions is a bit of a monstrosity, and that also shows in the codebases of available servers. It's no wonder, since XMPP does many things similar to SMTP (federated, based on DNS etc.). I would love if there was a modern, all in one XMPP server written in Go or Rust that includes all the protocol features in a sensible, opinionated package that is straightforward to deploy.. Until then, you'll find me fixing my Prosody instance..

Came to query the same thing. The product of this is targetted at custom enterprise solutions. Mentions specific platforms needed to meet government requirements etc. Maybe custom apps/platforms for interacting with support teams? Interfacing with custom hardware or systems to get updates passed around etc? I'm guess it's other things that are not for the "Slack"/Jabber use-case we might think of.

https://www.erlang-solutions.com/technologies/mongooseim/

Jmp.chat aka https://www.reddit.com/r/sopranica/ has built a whole business around xmpp for privacy, and it seems like there's often new XEPs adding features to the ecosystem.

Matrix has way better marketing, but XMPP just works (and has been working well for over a decade).

    Matrix has way better marketing, but XMPP just works (and has been working well for over a decade).

I have been thoroughly unimpressed by matrix. Connectivity issues, messages out of order, encryption errors, undelivered messages. From the way people talk about it I seem to be the only one, though.

On the other side I have had no issues with xmpp, despite using several devices for the same account.

You're not the only one, I've had the same experience with matrix and there was a blog post at the top of HN a few months ago titled "The Matrix Trashfire".

> From the way people talk about it I seem to be the only one, though

Not at all, I know a lot of people for whom the state of the main implementations is a show stopper.

I use it for sms and phone calls with https://jmp.chat, and have been testing snikket with family and friends. I can text/call from my laptop without my phone even being turned on. Pretty cheap too (for canada at least, our situation for cell plans has been historically terrible).

Jmp has gotten to be pretty solid over the last year, but snikket is sitll a little rough around the edges compared to signal.

Would love to hear any specific feedbacks in terms of ways you've found the client to be "rough around the edges".

I became unhappy with WhatsApp some time ago and decided to go all-in on XMPP. It's the internet standard for IM after all and I strongly feel we need more standardization instead of the wide fragmentation with so many proprietary apps and custom protocols. I'm quite happy so far. I'm hosting my own server for my extended family and also got ~20 friends to get standard XMPP addresses.

20 friends is very impressive! Do you have any tips for how to do it? If you don't mind me asking, do they also use it to chat amongst themselves / group chats etc - or only with you?

I also recently set up a server, and have convinced my partner and immediate family to join, but I feel I'm going to struggle to get my friends to do the same. Any tips on what works and what doesn't are greatly appreciated :)

I don't use anything else, and people get tired of sending me emails rather quickly... Also after you have some number of people with XMPP addresses you actually start to feel some network effect! I suspect most people just use it with me, but I have seen some friends who didn't know each other before to use it. Since they were in the same group chat this likely was just the easiest option, instead of asking me for their telephone number.

Interesting to note that WhatsApp started as a modified Mongoose IM.

@wut42: No, it was ejabberd! - https://docs.ejabberd.im/use-cases/

Mongoose IM is a fork of ejabberd: - https://www.ejabberd.im/ - https://github.com/processone/ejabberd

Ah thanks for the precision. I'm not exactly sure to be honest of the lineage of whatsapps/mongoose, some sources says it's based from Mongoose and/or had involvement from Erlang Solutions that ended up in Mongoose.

Anyway Mongoose and eJabberd have an amazing lineage and track record of uses and forks :)

I joined WhatsApp in late 2011 and left in late 2019. We always said we started with ejabberd and then replaced everything over time to get our system. I'm not sure about engagements with Erlang Solutions. I think that may have predated me, or it may have just not included me as I never did much with our chat server.

Facebook's chat system was built up with the same pattern: start with ejabberd, replace what you need to, eventually it's not the same at all (FB rewrote in C? because they couldn't hire Erlang people. WhatsApp rewrote in Erlang because Erlang is a very good fit for a chat app, and hired non-Erlang people and gave them Erlang books). I think RiotGames started with ejabberd as well.

I've used XMPP ~2 years ago and also set up my own server (prosody), it was a really good experience. Lightweight, Fast, reasonably secure way to chat with some friends.

But I switched to Matrix a year later, not because I liked Matrix more, but because there was no one using XMPP besides me and some friends, everyone else (foss projects and maintainers) was on Matrix.

I really would love to use XMPP again, as prosody was a brease to set up, never made problems and was really lightweight compute and storage wise. My Matrix homeserver (Synapse) uses 10x to 500x more RAM and CPU ( + the added CPU and RAM of my postgres istance) than prosody did, and its database is at least 10GB now (prosody used couple of MBs). Receiving and Sending via XMPP was also way faster than Matrix and large rooms on XMPP did not take 60+ seconds to load after you didn't check for a while.

Glad to hear you had a good experience with Prosody! We're currently preparing a new major release.

There's plenty of fun and cool stuff going on around XMPP, it's funny to see the comments from folk surprised whenever they hear snippets of news about it.

I join several Matrix rooms via the Bifrost XMPP<>Matrix bridge (there is an instance run by matrix.org, and another by an XMPP community member which has some additional patches for various things at archon.im). Alternatively, Slidge (a self-hostable XMPP bridging project) now has support for connecting to a Matrix account via XMPP (what the Matrix folk would call "puppet bridging"). I haven't tried that one myself yet.

XMPP dev and XSF member here.

I'm using XMPP for chatting of course, but also for blogging (my blog is XMPP based), A/V calls, events organization, file sharing, photo albums sharing, as a remote (with ad-hoc command, I've even built an specific UI to control MPRIS supporting player). I'm building an agenda, a forum, a generic list tool (TODO, shopping list), and other stuff.

I'm using Snikket to host a small server for family and friends, with accompanying mobile clients.

I've also built an XMPP <=> ActivityPub gateway (soon to be released, but dev version is already available), so my blog is accessible from any AP supporting client, and I can access the AP ecosystem (including events as seen in Mobilizon).

There is Slidge IM if you wanna talk to legacy network such as Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, Mattermost, Steam, Skype, Facebook Messenger, Matrix, VoIP.ms.

There is Biboumi if you wanna talk to IRC.

There are old and new email gateways on the work (I'll be working on one myself).

XMPP is used in many fields (from healthcare to games), you can have an idea at https://xmpp.org/uses/instant-messaging/ but I have the feeling that this list is not up-to-date and is incomplete. I think that it's used in Fornite for instance.

So yeah, we may not be the best for marketing, and we not have as much resources as we should, but XMPP is still well alive and kicking!

edit: Fornite is actually mentioned at https://xmpp.org/uses/gaming/ .

> So who uses XMPP today, and what’s it used instead of?

https://xmpp.org/uses/instant-messaging/

But besides this group, there's many using XMPP in their local groups who take advantage of the federation XMPP can still provide.

It’s also used quite a lot for running e.g the chat in online games, helldesk chat boxes and so on.

It’s quite difficult to run, I’ve found.

We dropped it for some node->redis pub/sub setup that was much easier (if slightly less reliable)

High-quality self-hosten messenger is still a very much need for those who cannot put sensitive data on Slack servers.

NOAA uses XMPP for sending out current weather conditions and alerts via either satellite or an XMPP server on the internet. I think the service is called NWWS.

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