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Comment by pkthunder | Hacker News Reader

I think the article brushes over something that adds (IMO) a ton of friction to Jabber/XMPP: self-hosting your own server. About 6 months ago, I tried to go down the awesome selfhosted XMPP servers list and it was just so painful I ended up finding an alternative stack.

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On the contrary I found hosting an xmpp server extremely easy and very light in maintenance with prosody. I've been doing it for years and it's the part of my infrastructure that I spend the least time on certainly.

Same! I tried to make a server using a tutorial from the HN popular page recently, and it wasn't working. I'd done it a decade ago but not in a public-facing way, just local IP addresses and no TLS.

Yeah, I explicitly wanted it as a non-public facing server and really just gave up.

I'm just a hobbyist sysadmin, but I did get a ton of exposure over the decades deploying some pretty random stuff, often taking the long and painful way as a learning experience (rarely using containers, often compiling from source, …). I vividly remember deploying ejabberd for the first time in disbelief: for all it was doing, it was just a fire and forget/good defaults/good logging/self-healing experience. Highly recommend.

Snikket claims to solve this but assumes it's got a routable IP address. If you've got it on a VM somewhere cloudy you're probably fine but I had to really jump through hoops to get it working behind NAT on my own hardware.

I just went with Prosody and it took maybe 20 minutes with claude+opentofu+docker to get it added to my stack.

It _works_, but the limitations of Jabber without 42 different optional extensions became apparent pretty quickly.

What stack did you land on?

Just a self-hosted Zulip instance for family members, exposed externally via Tailscale. I wanted to try Mongoose and Snikket (possibly Prosody as well, but can't recall), but I guess my infrastructure didn't want to line up directly with what they want for a quick start. shrug

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