where you could actually chat from your Google Talk account with FB Messenger accounts, by using the XMPP bridge
This is your regular reminder that this false memory is mythological. It's a very common false memory, but it never happened. Facebook never federated, nor was their over even XMPP at the time so far as we know. They had a mediocre bridge for accessing FB chats from an XMPP client, but you absolutely could not chat to that from your Google Talk account.
There's a conflict of interest if singpolyma promotes it, but not me; he's one of the people behind jmp.chat, which is an XMPP bridge to the POTS network for $5/mo. You can also get a data SIM from them. I've been a satisfied customer for almost 5 years now; it's really nice to have a cell provider where the frontline support are also the backend engineers. :)
This is not off-topic to the thread either; I'm pretty sure they're growing and building a future where XMPP is a core technology for telecommunications. Maybe the "XMPP era" the article describes was a local maximum, but I bet not a global one.
I believe the claim the author made is that this could be accomplished by running your own bridge that connected to the FB and Google bridges. So their usernames looked funny but you could still get them into a chat.
That still wouldn't let you talk from Google account to Facebook users? And if all they meant was a gateway could exist, sure, we still have a gateway from XMPP to Facebook Messenger today with slidge.
To me, what many seem to think was a high point for XMPP was a low point. If the only reason you used XMPP was to interface with chat systems run by megacorporations, is that really what we want? Sure, I won't stand in the way of creating bridges to proprietary networks and I would love to see every chat network in the world move to or be accessible from the Jabber network, but my usage of XMPP and the Jabber network doesn't need Google or Meta.
With XMPP and the federated Jabber network, I have control over who I chat with and how (free open source software running on my devices and theirs, identity not tied to a phone number, etc.). I want to bring more people in my direction more than I want to meet them where they're at (even though the latter can be an important step toward the former). I can send someone a Snikket invite, and (if they accept) they're now free from whatever proprietary system they were using when they want to talk with me. I don't need access to thousands or millions of strangers; I need access to a handful of friends and family members.
People talk about client quality, but I assure you the clients of today are much better than the clients of 2008. But you can also still use the clients from 2008 if you want! That's a strength. We do have a long way to go building clients that look the way people have come to expect, and there are lots of outdated guides out on the Web suggesting software and servers people probably shouldn't use anymore. None of that means XMPP is less than it was in 2008. It's only more!
My paycheck does come from a service built on XMPP and free open source software, so of course you can adjust for bias as MattJ suggested. We work closely together building new and exciting things on top of XMPP and bringing more and more people onto the Jabber network. There are some brilliant people working on making XMPP better and better, and it's the only chat protocol I use with regularity.
Interesting take. There’s obviously convenience in being about to talk across the network vs. across gateways with much better compatibility, but letting those entities be in control, it’s no surprise they chose to erect tho walls for the garden. Luckily in the last 3ish years, I have seen a reasonable uptick in users now that the word is out that XMPP actually self-hosts on low-spec hardware & many have the means to host it themselves—particularly with regards to Matrix’s protocol requiring much beefier hardware. Better late than never to see some more steam in uptake as the clients have gotten a lot better too.
I hope the future is trending more in this direction too—but I have seen many vibecoding yet another competing standard recentrly before at minimum asking their LLM if what exists could be adapted/extended.
Snikket is pretty easy to setup and run. There are a couple of decent XMPP clients, but yeah, no one uses it anymore. You'd have an easier time getting someone on IRC, despite the gap in functionality.
I think there is a wide gap between "everyone uses it" and "nobody uses it", that people seem to ignore. My family use XMPP to communicate with each other, and they don't know or care about the protocol, they just know it as "Snikket" or "the family chat". It's a useful tool in its own right, and while it would be nice if everyone was on a single protocol, it has benefits even for small groups.
I have various XMPP affiliations, including being the founder of Snikket, so feel free to adjust for bias. However I built Snikket to solve real-life problems, and it solves them, and I regularly hear from happy users. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
That's really great! On a whim, I went and poked around with podman and got a working setup on my tiny VPS. I'll kick the tires and see if I can find people to chat with.
Biggest problem I see is XMPP requiring accounts and there not being that many open servers.
So "talk to me on XMPP" becomes "Talk to me on XMPP and make an account somewhere because my XMPP server might not actually be accepting new signups". At least Matrix or Masto there's a tendency to have invites set up
This all changes if, for example, conferences leaned into XMPP but all the conference chatter I've seen that wasn't on discord ended up being on Matrix.
There are a great many volunteer operated free servers.
However, in the context of this thread especially, I'd primarily suggest ignoring all of that and using Snikket. A Snikket instance comes with a great invite system which makes it easy for friends and family to onboard, end up with each other and you as contacts, and not have to think about where to get an account or if the volunteer running this server will have a bad day.
There are a great many volunteer operated free servers.
serious q: which ones?
I'd primarily suggest ignoring all of that and using Snikket. A Snikket instance comes with a great invite system which makes it easy for friends and family to onboard
I think this advice is akin to "set up an email server and give out email addresses to everyone you want to contact you". This has high activation energy (and Snikket is not that cheap! I paid for a year and am capped at 10 users. The "I set up a lobsters XMPP chat room" hypthetical turning into "I also am hosting a bunch of people's accounts".... I dunno)
Conferences at least tend to have someone who is available to futz with the server, at least for the lifetime of the conf to have people get a taste for things
I used to host an XMPP server. It was nice. Some time after google defederated, it stopped feeling worthwhile to do that anymore. There were a few users directly on my server, but the really nice part was being able to chat with anyone who had gmail, with absolutely no fuss. (And with just a little fuss, you could use OTR with them for private chats.)
I also used to maintain a fork of the InstantBird XMPP client with a niche extension or two, before XUL got killed off. I still miss that one. My fork had a single digit audience, but it wasn't hard to maintain, and I liked it.
I think trying to be "protocol driven" is what often kills these efforts. For a user the app is king. There are huge benefits to the app using an open protocol. There are benefits to their friends using different apps to be able to chat with them. But at the end of the day close contacts often want "the same" experience which of course requires using the same app, no matter what the protocol.
There's an awful lot of rose-colored glasses in regards to XMPP. The one time I had to seriously rely on tools in the XMPP orbit I ran into all sorts of jank: messages delivered multiple times, missing history across devices, and weird incompatibilities between clients.
singpolyma | 8 hours ago
This is your regular reminder that this false memory is mythological. It's a very common false memory, but it never happened. Facebook never federated, nor was their over even XMPP at the time so far as we know. They had a mediocre bridge for accessing FB chats from an XMPP client, but you absolutely could not chat to that from your Google Talk account.
Aks | 3 hours ago
I think its a misremembering of using Pidgin that could talk with both Google and FB accounts.
IohannesArnold | 6 hours ago
There's a conflict of interest if singpolyma promotes it, but not me; he's one of the people behind jmp.chat, which is an XMPP bridge to the POTS network for $5/mo. You can also get a data SIM from them. I've been a satisfied customer for almost 5 years now; it's really nice to have a cell provider where the frontline support are also the backend engineers. :)
This is not off-topic to the thread either; I'm pretty sure they're growing and building a future where XMPP is a core technology for telecommunications. Maybe the "XMPP era" the article describes was a local maximum, but I bet not a global one.
WilhelmVonWeiner | 2 hours ago
What makes you suggest XMPP would work better for telecommunications than SIP? Do you mean XMPP as the client-facing protocol for telecommunications?
singpolyma | 2 hours ago
Yes we use it for client facing. It's much more mobile and NAT friendly than SIP usually is, for example.
WilhelmVonWeiner | 2 hours ago
SIP NAT traversal gives me nightmares.
Bernerd | 6 hours ago
at least for facebook text messaging i can state as a fact that i could connect with a regular xmpp client like pidgin gajim conversations
singpolyma | 6 hours ago
Indeed you could, as I said. But you could not chat to Facebook users from a Google or otherwise non-Facebook account.
ptman | 5 hours ago
connecting as a client is not the same as facebook and gtalk servers federating with each other
singpolyma | 3 hours ago
Indeed
dvogel | 2 hours ago
I believe the claim the author made is that this could be accomplished by running your own bridge that connected to the FB and Google bridges. So their usernames looked funny but you could still get them into a chat.
singpolyma | 2 hours ago
That still wouldn't let you talk from Google account to Facebook users? And if all they meant was a gateway could exist, sure, we still have a gateway from XMPP to Facebook Messenger today with slidge.
gnafuthegreat | 8 hours ago
To me, what many seem to think was a high point for XMPP was a low point. If the only reason you used XMPP was to interface with chat systems run by megacorporations, is that really what we want? Sure, I won't stand in the way of creating bridges to proprietary networks and I would love to see every chat network in the world move to or be accessible from the Jabber network, but my usage of XMPP and the Jabber network doesn't need Google or Meta.
With XMPP and the federated Jabber network, I have control over who I chat with and how (free open source software running on my devices and theirs, identity not tied to a phone number, etc.). I want to bring more people in my direction more than I want to meet them where they're at (even though the latter can be an important step toward the former). I can send someone a Snikket invite, and (if they accept) they're now free from whatever proprietary system they were using when they want to talk with me. I don't need access to thousands or millions of strangers; I need access to a handful of friends and family members.
People talk about client quality, but I assure you the clients of today are much better than the clients of 2008. But you can also still use the clients from 2008 if you want! That's a strength. We do have a long way to go building clients that look the way people have come to expect, and there are lots of outdated guides out on the Web suggesting software and servers people probably shouldn't use anymore. None of that means XMPP is less than it was in 2008. It's only more!
My paycheck does come from a service built on XMPP and free open source software, so of course you can adjust for bias as MattJ suggested. We work closely together building new and exciting things on top of XMPP and bringing more and more people onto the Jabber network. There are some brilliant people working on making XMPP better and better, and it's the only chat protocol I use with regularity.
toastal | 3 hours ago
Interesting take. There’s obviously convenience in being about to talk across the network vs. across gateways with much better compatibility, but letting those entities be in control, it’s no surprise they chose to erect tho walls for the garden. Luckily in the last 3ish years, I have seen a reasonable uptick in users now that the word is out that XMPP actually self-hosts on low-spec hardware & many have the means to host it themselves—particularly with regards to Matrix’s protocol requiring much beefier hardware. Better late than never to see some more steam in uptake as the clients have gotten a lot better too.
I hope the future is trending more in this direction too—but I have seen many vibecoding yet another competing standard recentrly before at minimum asking their LLM if what exists could be adapted/extended.
ndegruchy | 9 hours ago
Snikket is pretty easy to setup and run. There are a couple of decent XMPP clients, but yeah, no one uses it anymore. You'd have an easier time getting someone on IRC, despite the gap in functionality.
MattJ | 9 hours ago
I think there is a wide gap between "everyone uses it" and "nobody uses it", that people seem to ignore. My family use XMPP to communicate with each other, and they don't know or care about the protocol, they just know it as "Snikket" or "the family chat". It's a useful tool in its own right, and while it would be nice if everyone was on a single protocol, it has benefits even for small groups.
I have various XMPP affiliations, including being the founder of Snikket, so feel free to adjust for bias. However I built Snikket to solve real-life problems, and it solves them, and I regularly hear from happy users. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
veqq | 9 hours ago
ndegruchy | 7 hours ago
That's really great! On a whim, I went and poked around with podman and got a working setup on my tiny VPS. I'll kick the tires and see if I can find people to chat with.
Keep up the great work!
gnafuthegreat | 7 hours ago
Welcome! Check out https://search.jabber.network/ for some public chats.
rtpg | 2 hours ago
Biggest problem I see is XMPP requiring accounts and there not being that many open servers.
So "talk to me on XMPP" becomes "Talk to me on XMPP and make an account somewhere because my XMPP server might not actually be accepting new signups". At least Matrix or Masto there's a tendency to have invites set up
This all changes if, for example, conferences leaned into XMPP but all the conference chatter I've seen that wasn't on discord ended up being on Matrix.
singpolyma | 2 hours ago
There are a great many volunteer operated free servers.
However, in the context of this thread especially, I'd primarily suggest ignoring all of that and using Snikket. A Snikket instance comes with a great invite system which makes it easy for friends and family to onboard, end up with each other and you as contacts, and not have to think about where to get an account or if the volunteer running this server will have a bad day.
rtpg | an hour ago
serious q: which ones?
I think this advice is akin to "set up an email server and give out email addresses to everyone you want to contact you". This has high activation energy (and Snikket is not that cheap! I paid for a year and am capped at 10 users. The "I set up a lobsters XMPP chat room" hypthetical turning into "I also am hosting a bunch of people's accounts".... I dunno)
Conferences at least tend to have someone who is available to futz with the server, at least for the lifetime of the conf to have people get a taste for things
singpolyma | an hour ago
https://providers.xmpp.net/ Just to name a few
I agree if you're interested in large community chat ala discord Snikket is not a good fit for that case. More for the friends/family case.
hoistbypetard | 6 hours ago
I used to host an XMPP server. It was nice. Some time after google defederated, it stopped feeling worthwhile to do that anymore. There were a few users directly on my server, but the really nice part was being able to chat with anyone who had gmail, with absolutely no fuss. (And with just a little fuss, you could use OTR with them for private chats.)
I also used to maintain a fork of the InstantBird XMPP client with a niche extension or two, before XUL got killed off. I still miss that one. My fork had a single digit audience, but it wasn't hard to maintain, and I liked it.
BinaryIgor | 7 hours ago
Interesting - hopefully, we will go back to the more open and protocol-, not client-, driven internet.
Out of curiosity though: is it something inherent in the Matrix protocol that requires that much resources or is rather an implementation issue?
singpolyma | 7 hours ago
I think trying to be "protocol driven" is what often kills these efforts. For a user the app is king. There are huge benefits to the app using an open protocol. There are benefits to their friends using different apps to be able to chat with them. But at the end of the day close contacts often want "the same" experience which of course requires using the same app, no matter what the protocol.
BinaryIgor | 6 hours ago
True; and it's also hard to build network effect around the protocol. Why apps should care to implement it, when nobody is there yet?
intelfx | an hour ago
I’d say 50/50 (or, to be more charitable, 30/70 perhaps).
Relax | 49 minutes ago
There's an awful lot of rose-colored glasses in regards to XMPP. The one time I had to seriously rely on tools in the XMPP orbit I ran into all sorts of jank: messages delivered multiple times, missing history across devices, and weird incompatibilities between clients.