XMPP

» go to xmpp.org now (it still works)

~ what it is ~

chat was supposed to work like email. you pick a server, you get an address shaped like a name at a domain, and you can message anyone on any other server, because the servers talk to each other. xmpp is the protocol that still works that way. there is no central company, no master server, no terms of service for the network as a whole. anyone can run a server, and thousands of people do.

it began as jabber, announced by jeremie miller on january 4, 1999, an open answer to the locked silos of the icq and aim era, where every messenger required its own account and refused to speak to the others. the ietf took the protocol up in 2002 and standardized it as xmpp, with the core rfcs published in october 2004 and revised in 2011. an open standards body, the xmpp standards foundation, has extended it ever since through public extension documents.

~ the federation spring ~

for a while the open model looked like it was winning. google talk launched in august 2005 speaking xmpp, and in january 2006 google switched on server-to-server federation, meaning a gmail user could chat with someone on any jabber server on the planet. i had a jabber account bridged to my google contacts in those years and it felt like the obvious future, chat as a commons, the way email had always been.

in may 2013 google announced it was dropping xmpp federation on its way to hangouts, and the walls went back up. the message from the industry was clear. openness had been a customer acquisition phase, not a principle. google talk has its own grave on this site now, and hangouts, its successor, has been through so many renames and shutdowns that the graves practically need a family plot.

~ the secret adoption ~

here is the joke buried in the whole story. while the public messengers were abandoning xmpp, the biggest messenger on earth was built on it. whatsapp runs a heavily modified xmpp derivative on its backend, a fact that surfaced through engineering talks and job postings rather than any announcement. other large platforms have used xmpp machinery internally too. the protocol did not fail at scale. it runs at the largest scale there is. what failed was the willingness to federate, which was never a technical property in the first place.

~ still federating ~

the open network never stopped. servers run on ejabberd and prosody, software mature enough that jabber.org itself, the original server from 1999, migrated to prosody in 2023. conversations on android is a genuinely good modern client, gajim and dino cover the desktops, and the extension process has kept adding modern expectations, encryption, media, group chat, onto the 1999 core. the network is small next to whatsapp. it is also twenty seven years old, has survived every one of its commercial rivals from the era it was born in, and requires nobody's permission to join.

~ why it still matters ~

every messenger in this site's graveyard died the same way, a company decision, a shutdown date, an export tool if the users were lucky. aim, icq, msn messenger, yahoo messenger, google talk. their users lost their contacts, their history, their addresses. an xmpp address cannot be shut down by anyone except the person running the server, and if that happens you move servers, the way you would move email providers, without asking the rest of the network for permission.

xmpp is proof, kept running on volunteer hardware for over two decades, that chat did not have to become a set of walled gardens. it became one anyway, but the proof is still online, still federating, still accepting new servers. losing the market is not the same as being wrong.

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