What we once had (at the height of the XMPP era of the Internet) (2023)

> And: my modest little web server could not cope. Apparently, the way Matrix federates between servers is that your server needs to download the entire world of all the chat history since the beginning of all time on that remote chat room.

XMPP is not free of a similar 'dumb by design' things. XML - first of course. Different ports for a different things along with STARTTLS - fifteen years since mobile revolution and everything should be wrapped under tcp/443. Totally alien group/room logic. Lack of any decent clients for... for everything, honestly. OMEMO shenanigans.

Just recently I tried to self-host prosody/snikket service for a group of people who really needs a way to talk to each other privately... and it's beyond disastrous.

So while lamenting on the old days it should be always remembered what the death of XMPP wasn't a thousand cuts but just it's own inability to progress with the world.

NB: yes, OpenFire was rad 15 years ago. Pandion with a SSO login and later MirandaIM - and you had a working enterprise chatter in no time.

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