Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence
- ID
- 17714
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 24 Aug 2026, 11:51 PM
- Fetched
- 26 Aug 2026, 5:01 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://gultsch.de/posts/25-years-of-digital-independence/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 4.5
- Created
- 26 Aug 2026, 5:02 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developerssaas_founders
What happened
Daniel Gultsch reflects on 25 years of Jabber/XMPP, arguing that digital services should be treated as infrastructure that must remain collectively owned and interoperable through open standards, not controlled by profit-oriented corporations. He draws parallels to physical infrastructure (roads, water, power grids) and warns Europe against simply swapping American tech corporations for European ones.
Why it matters
If you run messaging, chat, or real-time communication features in your product, this is a reminder that XMPP remains a viable open-standard alternative to proprietary platforms—and that vendor lock-in in communication infrastructure is costly to reverse later. Malaysian founders building chat or notification systems should weigh whether self-hostable XMPP-based solutions reduce dependency risk versus defaulting to a single cloud vendor's messaging API.
Discussion angle
Is XMPP still practically worth adopting for new products in 2026, or is this purely an ideological argument? Compare the real maintenance cost of self-hosting XMPP versus using managed messaging APIs from cloud providers.