What we once had (at the height of the XMPP era of the Internet)

A discussion thread I got pulled into on Mastodon had me suddenly nostalgic for something we once had on the Internet, and which was really nice while it lasted: the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, or XMPP, or sometimes referred to by its original name, Jabber.

What kicked off the discussion was somebody asking about a more modern "decentralized chat platform" known as Matrix (not the movie). A lot of people online talk about how they like Matrix, but I one time had a go at self-hosting my own Matrix node (which I feel I should rant about briefly, below), and the discussion turned back towards something that we used to have which was (in my opinion) loads better, XMPP.

Update (Oct 18 2024): to address some feedback this post had gathered.

Yes, XMPP technically still exists and some people in the world still use it. As a free & open source product with an open standard, of course XMPP is never going away. People still use IRC, too, after all! IRC will never go away in the same way XMPP never will: insert relevant xkcd comic here.

This blog post was about the height of XMPP, circa 2008 - when actual, real "normal" people in my personal life actually knew what XMPP was and they had an account. This was when AOL Instant Messenger, MSN, Yahoo were all a thing, and Trillian and Pidgin were commonly used programs that "everybody" knew about, where they could sign in to all these myriad messengers. XMPP back in this era also had first-class support by Facebook and Google (where you could actually chat from your Google Talk account with FB Messenger accounts, by using the XMPP bridge).

All of that stuff does not really exist anymore. Google and Facebook walled off their gardens, all the other instant messengers have died off and been replaced by even more proprietary mobile apps; Pidgin still barely hangs on with keeping pace with modern messenger protocols. And in 2024 when you research XMPP server software: you still see references to "AIM and MSN bridges" despite these messengers no longer existing and the bridges no longer working. XMPP is not what it was (at its 'height' around 2008) any longer. I don't know a single human in my real life who remembers what XMPP is or has an account on any XMPP server. And for most of them: there would be little point to even set up an XMPP server, since "nobody" uses it.

As an open source protocol, of course some people, somewhere in the world, use XMPP - perhaps for their internal company communications, or within the confines of a university or other community where your SysAdmin wanted a chat platform for internal use. If you actually have friends & family and chat with "normal people" outside of your workplace and XMPP is used, I would be curious to hear your story in the comments.

My experience with self-hosting Matrix

So, to briefly summarize Matrix: in theory it is a decentralized instant messenger where anybody could set up their own Matrix server if they wanted to (on their own custom domain name), and regardless of which server your account is signed up on, you can chat with and interact with other Matrix users on their respective servers. It's a bit like Mastodon or the the Fediverse of social websites but for instant messaging and chat.

Sounds great. Is it?

In my opinion (and based on my direct experience in trying to set up my own Matrix node, just for myself, on my @kirsle.net domain name), I think Matrix has a severe scaling problem and that you will only have a good experience using it if you stick only to the flagship matrix.org instance for your account (or sign up on a third-party server run by somebody who has deep pockets for running the sort of monstrously beefy server machine that it requires to run a Matrix server well).

Here's my story with it. So, I have a smartphone that runs GNU/Linux, the Pinephone, and I basically wanted to use Discord or Slack on it. The problem is, there is no Discord or Slack app that runs on ARM Linux or on the small form-factor of a mobile phone screen. There are Matrix apps that fit the bill, and I heard that Matrix can set up bridges to Slack and Discord and a bunch of other useful things, to where I might use a Matrix client and (connecting through my server) get what I wanted out of my Pinephone.

But, you basically need to run your own Matrix server to do this. Not a problem: I am well versed in self-hosting apps. I elected to install the standard Matrix Synapse server on my kirsle.net machine (which had 4 GB RAM -- plenty plenty to run nearly everything that I would want to install for personal use). This was apparently a mistake.

So here's what happened: I got it all set up and I logged on using a desktop Matrix client and, like any new Matrix user would probably want to do, I joined "the" Matrix channel on matrix.org#matrix - the big, "main" channel that everybody would want to join. It would be a good test that my server federates correctly with matrix.org and everything as well.

And: my modest little web server could not cope. Apparently, the way Matrix federates between servers is that your server needs to download the entire world of all the chat history since the beginning of all time on that remote chat room. In my desktop client I was seeing spinning, timeouts, and connection errors. I only knew my server was busy doing something because I could watch its log file. Now, mind you, my Matrix server was only for myself, I was the only user on it. Imagine I had a second user, and their Matrix client is hanging and stalling and timing out, and they don't know why and what a sour taste they would get about this whole Matrix thing.

For me to run my own single user Matrix instance, just for myself and join the matrix.org#matrix channel (the channel), I would need at least twice the server hardware specs and that is just too high of a price tag for it to ever be worth it (e.g. $40/mo. at minimum, and that's all for Matrix, as any other app I run on that server would compete for those resources; and a $40/mo. "subscription" for a single-user Matrix instance is just absurd).

Anyway, let's move on to XMPP because that shit was actually nice to run.

What XMPP was like

So, XMPP was a similar idea. Anybody could run their own XMPP server and your username looked like an e-mail address and you could add your friends to your buddy list and chat, share files or go on webcam with each other (depending on the capabilities of each of your servers - XMPP was extensible after all and things like video sharing were extensions added on).

But the best part of XMPP was how well it played with the wider Internet community:

• Google Talk and Facebook Messenger both had XMPP bridges to their networks. From my @kirsle.net XMPP account I could add my friends @facebook.com to my buddy list and chat with them right from there, and same for Google Talk.
• Like Matrix, XMPP had bridges to other instant messengers such as AIM and MSN. Now, back in the day we had desktop apps like Trillian or Pidgin that allowed you to sign on to all your messengers from a single buddy list, but XMPP bridges were done on the server side. So my Pidgin would log in only to my @kirsle.net XMPP server and I would automatically be on AIM, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger and elsewhere. When my AIM buddies would send me a message, their XMPP 'e-mail address' ended with an @aim.kirsle.net domain suffix under my server domain.

Also importantly: XMPP server software ran lightweight as fuck. My favorite XMPP server software was called Openfire, and it has been by far the best experience I'd ever had installing any kind of server. I simply apt install openfire and it's running, and had a nice web UI for me to set up the admin account and configure my app. I literally had to not touch a single config file. Not at all like Matrix for example where I needed to configure my NGINX reverse proxy and fuck with a bunch of files on disk to get it working.

Anyway. XMPP still technically "exists" but nobody uses it anymore. Well, some companies use it for their own internal purposes. On Android, apps such as Kik and Grindr use XMPP for their messenger service, but their servers don't federate with others and act as private walled gardens.

Google and Facebook had long ago closed down their XMPP bridges in favor of holding their users hostage. AIM, MSN and other classic instant messengers no longer exist. It's a bit sad: if you look for XMPP server software today you still see references to AIM or MSN bridges but they won't work anymore, and bridges for more modern networks like Discord are either hard to find or non-existent.

In my opinion, the height of the open Internet was exemplified by XMPP and how it inter-operated with all the messengers people used and even the big sites like Google and Facebook were open to federating with XMPP servers. Nowadays, while you could still install an XMPP server (it is free and open source, and an open standard network protocol, and nothing about that has changed), you would be on a lonely island to yourself since basically nobody uses it anymore.

It's what Matrix should be, if only Matrix were better designed and didn't have that scalability problem that it currently faces.

You shouldn't require a monster server with 32 GB+ RAM and a 5 Terabyte hard drive just to run a Matrix node and have breathing room besides. I used to be able to run XMPP alongside a dozen other self-hosted apps. I could run XMPP alongside things like Nextcloud, Gitea, my kirsle.net blog, a Minecraft server, a Jellyfin server, and probably a dozen other apps who would all comfortably share a modest server with only 4 GB of memory on it. Hell, 2 GB would be plenty for most single-user self-hosting purposes, if you kick out the Minecraft server.

Anyway, I was just feeling nostalgic and sad about how there isn't anything quite like XMPP in the modern era and Matrix is far, far from it and I don't know of anything better than Matrix anymore.

I am optimistic recently about Mastodon and the Fediverse, with sites like Threads (Meta) or Tumblr (Automattic) considering federation with these apps via the ActivityPub protocol. We might get back to a more friendly, more open Internet again -- hopefully these companies won't pull another XMPP move and defederate again once they see a shot they can take to hold their users hostage again (the ol' reliable EEE strategy).