A dive into open chat protocols

Summary

A dive into open chat protocols I’m between projects right now, so as is my idiom I’m going to take some random topic that has caught me on a manic swing in my little bipolar life, and dive deeper into it for a few days. One of the low-key topics in the back of my mind is that “the world needs an open chat protocol that doesn’t suck”, and something made me start thinking seriously about XMPP again for the first time in a decade. I used XMPP myself a fair amount in its little Golden Age of the early 2010s, I ran an XMPP server or two, and it mostly worked pretty okay. And then Google embraced and extinguished it, WhatsApp got big and then got swallowed by Facebook, and there was this weird lull where no particularly good chat service existed and we all just used IRC and Mumble until Discord exploded onto the scene in the late 2010s. I hopped on Discord and never looked back until now, as Discord becomes slowly but inevitably enshittified, and suddenly people are really interested in alternatives. The Hip Alternative is Matrix, but there’s a slowly building amount of reactionary ire against it as people try to use it, so I’m wondering: Why not Zoidberg XMPP? In 2025, the main problems with XMPP seem to be: It’s Not Cool It uses XML and XML is grody There’s ten million extensions and compatibility is a nightmare Some of its encryption stuff is not good enough for a post-Snowden world, which is made harder by the extensions being a mess Meanwhile Matrix has had a lot of malding written about it on lobste.rs this year, and no particularly positive endorsements. But most of those complaints actually go into any particular depth besides “it doesn’t work well and it makes me angy”. That matches my own experiences with Matrix, so a lot of that malding resonates with me, but one thing I’ve learned in life is that complaining about something might be a useful signal of a problem’s existence, but actually trying to solve the problem carries 1000x more weight. And most of these ...