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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.
These include conversations.im on android, dino on linux, which also
works pretty nicely on linux phones, gajim for a more fully featured
option that includes the kitchen sink, profanity for text interface
fanatics like me, and I've heard that monal works decently enough on the
iThings.
One thing that sets XMPP apart from other federated protocols, is that
it has already gone through the phase where everybody was on one *very*
big server, which then cut out federation, and we've learned from the
experience. These days there are still a few places that cather to
newcomers, like the ones on these slides, but most people are actually
on servers of a manageable size.
My strong recommendation is for community hosting: not just self-hosting
for yourself, but finding a community you feel part of and trust, and
share a server with them, whether managed by volunteers from the
community itself, or by a paid provider.
If you are a Debian Developer, you already have one: you can go to the
address in the slide, set your own password, wait an hour or so and
you're good to go.
A few years ago it had remained a bit behind, but these days it's
managed by an active team, and if you're missing some features, or just
want to know what's happening with it, you can join their BoF on friday
afternoon (and also thank them for their work).
But for most people in this room, I'd also recommend finding a friend or
two who can help as a backup, and run a server for your own families or
community: as a certified lazy person who doesn't like doing sysadmin
jobs, I can guarantee it's perfeclty feasible, about in the same range
of difficulty as running your own web server for a static site.
The two most popular servers for this, prosody and ejabberd, are well
maintained in Debian, and these days there isn't a lot more to do than
installing them, telling them your hostname, setting up a few DNS
entries, and then you mostly need to keep the machine updated and very
little else.
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