A nostalgic reflection on XMPP (Jabber) at its peak around 2008, when it federated with Google Talk, Facebook Messenger, AIM, and MSN, enabling a truly open and interoperable messaging ecosystem. The author contrasts this with Matrix, sharing a firsthand experience of trying to self-host a Matrix Synapse node on a 4 GB RAM server, only to find it overwhelmed by downloading the full history of a large public room. XMPP server software like Openfire ran lightweight enough to share a modest server with a dozen other apps, while Matrix demands beefy hardware even for a single-user instance. The post mourns the decline of XMPP as Google and Facebook walled off their gardens, and expresses cautious optimism about ActivityPub and the Fediverse, while warning against a repeat of the embrace-extend-extinguish pattern.
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