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Comment by MattJ100 | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of us are still working on XMPP, and there are thousands of XMPP servers and many more users on the network.

It's true that since the original Jabber project began in 1999 there was a vision of giving users freedom of software and service, yet that vision is still nowhere near reality in 2019. But we are still an active community and still work towards that vision. XMPP is not dead.

Unfortunately Pidgin and Adium were two of the most popular clients for XMPP, and their development (in Adium's case) and XMPP development (in Pidgin's case) has almost completely stalled, which is unfortunate. Alternative XMPP projects are still very actively developed.

The XMPP community recently began holding sprints, where a bunch of us get together in real life to focus on specific topics, such as UX and interop. It's been great!

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For those searching a very simple to use XMPP client:

Quicksy.im: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.quicksy.cli...

It is a fork (same developers) of the popular Conversations client, which does not bother you with provider selection and such kind of technical decisions. If you just want to try XMPP or invite someone, it is probably the easiest way to start with.

> and there are thousands of XMPP servers

proof please. Checked the top 3-4 xmpp servers last summer and they almost died.

IRC looks 1000000x more active.

I'm not sure how you are judging "activity". I suspect you are talking about chatrooms. In this sense, yes, IRC probably would look pretty active - it is built around the concept of channels, the majority of which tend to be public. XMPP is far more diverse, rooms are spread across multiple servers with no central way to list them. A project that aims to spider the network and help find rooms is at: https://search.jabber.network/ (note that this doesn't currently index jabber.org, traditionally one of the larger hosts, due to a technical glitch I believe).

My mention of thousands of servers is not related to public chatrooms however. There are a bunch of public servers which you can register accounts on, but many more private ones (that federate) run by businesses and individuals and other organisations. A quick shodan search reports 55,760 unique IP addresses speaking XMPP publicly on port 5269 (the default federation port): https://www.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A5269+http%3A%2F%2F...

> I'm not sure how you are judging "activity"

OK, "324 Kuketz-Blog (kuketzblog@rooms.dismail.de)" seems like most popular jabber channel, right?

Here's the #freenode top in this moment:

#linux 2000

#python 1950

#archlinux 1860

And it's ONLY first 3 top channels.

So, the facts matters.

> the facts matters.

Indeed. Could you also provide the number of 1:1 chats and private groupchats running on freenode, then? Both of these are way more popular use cases for XMPP than public rooms.

XMPP is different from Matrix.

On Matrix practically everyone is matrix.org. The other public servers I tried are relatively slow and suffer hickups when joining rooms.

On XMPP, many people run servers in their companies, projects, or homes. Which are the "top 3-4 XMPP servers"? I probably do not even know them.

But you are right: XMPP is used mainly for IM, i.e. one-to-one dialogues or smaller, non-public chatrooms. I'm not aware of any huge, public chatrooms in XMPP, and for that I'm on IRC — via a gateway from XMPP called biboumi.

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