Communicating is a basic human need, and today some kind of
computer-mediated communication is a requirement for most people,
especially those in this room.

With *everything* that is happening, it's now more important than ever
that these means of communication aren't controlled by entities that
can't be trusted, whether because they can stop providing the service at
any given time or worse because they are going to abuse it in order to
extract more profit.

If only there was a well established chat system based on some standard
developed in an open way, with all of the features one expects
from a chat system but federated so that one can choose between many
different and independent providers, or even self-hosting.

But wait, it does exist!

I'm not talking about IRC, I'm talking about XMPP!

While it has been around since the last millenium, it has not remained
still, with hundred of XMPP Extenstion Protocols, or XEPs that have been
developed to add all of the features that nobody in 1999 imagined we
could need in Instant Messaging today, and more, such as IoT devices or
even social networks.

There is a myth that this makes XMPP a mess of incompatible software,
but there is an XEP for that: XEP-0479: XMPP Compliance Suites 2023,
which is a list of XEPs that needs to be supported by Instant Messaging
servers and clients, including mobile ones, and all of the recommended
ones will mostly just work.