What we once had: a love letter to XMPP — and a warning about Matrix

The ghost of Jabber

A thread on Mastodon pulled one writer back to a time when chat felt open. It has been reported that the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol — XMPP, originally Jabber — was once something normal people actually used. Back around 2008, the post recalls, instant messengers like AIM, MSN, and Yahoo were everywhere, and clients such as Trillian and Pidgin let you talk to everyone from one app. Facebook and Google even offered first-class XMPP hooks, so cross-service chatting was real. Feels like another era, doesn’t it?

Matrix tried to be the successor

Enter Matrix: in theory, a decentralized chat network where anyone can run a server and still reach everyone else. The blogger says they tried to self-host a Matrix node — on a Pinephone, no less — and found the experience rough. It has been reported that they ran into what they describe as severe scaling problems, and they argue you’ll likely get the best experience by using the flagship matrix.org instance or a well-funded third-party host. That’s a sharp pill for decentralization advocates to swallow: open spec, but heavy infrastructure.

Standards survive; networks don’t

XMPP isn’t dead. Allegedly, a small, committed community still uses it for internal company chat or niche projects, much like IRC persists. But the network effect is gone: bridges to the old giants are history, and Pidgin now scrapes by trying to keep up with proprietary platforms. The emotional core here is simple — we once had interoperable, open messaging that behaved like the open web; now we have walled gardens and heavy, centralized beasts. Want to tell a different story? If you actually use XMPP with friends and family today, the author says they’d like to hear from you.

Sources: kirsle.net, Lobsters