So I set up a XMPP server in my homelab this weekend to see how the ecosystem has evolved since the last time I used it. Only took me a few hours.
It seems like it has pretty much everything we'd expect from IM these days? E2EE with forward secrecy, group chats, message archives, reactions, file uploads, audio messages, voice and video calling, location sharing, etc. etc. It's even federated!
Why are we sleeping on this tech? Is there some unmitigated downside I haven't discovered yet?
@jae @gnemmi yeah, I just ran into this actually. Told a friend that I'm using Conversations on Android. Then they tell me it's $7 on the play store. I was blindsided by that because I installed it from F-Droid, where it's free.
Installing F-Droid or paying the play store tax is high barrier of entry for non-technical folks to experiment with the tech.
Which is something I say with mixed feelings, because open source developers absolutely deserve to be compensated.
@smn @gnemmi i can appreciate that dilemma. for the newcomer, dropping 7-20$ on an app just to test often isn't reasonable or at least not a priority when signal/whatsapp/etc "just works".
but hey, many of us technical people are on xmpp (or dual like me on #deltachat) so we can still keep in touch.
btw what xmpp server are you running? i'm fleshing out an implementation based on an xmpp-go setup i found on github since i'm sort of obsessed with go. :-)
@jae @gnemmi I went with ejabberd, since that's what I used to run back in the day.
Very cool that acme support is built in these days, but I wish the docs gave better advice for how to expose port 80 to succeed at the HTTP-01 challenge. Fortunately I already had a reverse proxy listening on port 80 so setting that up for this project was simple. I do feel like a lot of novice or even intermediate sysadmins might get stuck here though.
Not thrilled about the plaintext password default either.
Justin Fitzsimmons
Gonzalo Nemmi 
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