A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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We have an !xmpp@slrpnk.net community here on Lemmy. Our SLRPNK instance also gives an XMPP account to every member automatically and hosts a Movim webclient for easy access.
XMPP is certainly more popular for private groups and 1:1 chatting so you will not find that many large public channels, but there is a search engine here: https://search.jabber.network/tags/
The JoinJabber project also has a curated list of recommended channels and communities: https://joinjabber.org/docs/faqs/rooms/
Awesom, thanks for that. I'll do some digging to see how widely used it is. Cheers
Is there a use case with bots and xmpp?
What do you mean with bots in this context?
I have seen telegram and Whatsapp bots that vänt control various selfhosted apps or just report from them. I just wondered if that was a thing on xmpp too.
The reverse, i.e. getting outage notifications and so on via xmpp is quite common.
I can't really think of any usecase to control self-hosted apps from a messenger, but sure, technically you could write such a bot quite easily.
Ah okay, notifications would be nice.
I was thinking about n8n integrations for example
To answer your question on where it's used, have you seen https://providers.xmpp.net/ ?
(It might be worth testing your client against a few different servers...)
That's where I found who to use, until I get to setting up prosody at home.
Lots there to take a look at. I'll definitely be setting up unit tests to test out multiple servers for sure.
jabber.org is a major server.
Please don't recommend jabber.org, it is super outdated and lacks almost all modern features.
Thanks, is there any indication on the number of daily users for some of those servers? Some of the IRC indexes would have usage graphs to get an idea of how popular it was.
XMPP is truly decentralized with no single point that collects this kind of data. There have been some attempts over the years, but they always failed to capture more than a fraction of the network. A recent one is more artistic in nature, probably realizing the futility of it.
The popular Conversations app has sold 100k+ units on the PlayStore, but since you can also legally get it for free, that is probably only part of the actual users.
Thats great, thanks. By the sounds of it I can probably continue with developed, I just need to find where people are going and what servers have the biggest population.
Thanks again!
I haven't been using instant messaging programs much for some years, but checking https://old.reddit.com/r/xmpp/ I see:
https://www.glukhov.org/post/2025/09/xmpp-jabber-userbase-and-popularity/
This has an estimate of 13–20 million users globally for 2023, but warns that because many servers don't publish information about their userbase, there's necessarily uncertainty. According to it, Germany is the country with the largest userbase, followed by Russia, followed by the US.