Hello everyone! Are there any benefits of hosting your own XMPP server, considering I always use end-to-end encryption in all of my chats?
Hello everyone! Are there any benefits of hosting your own XMPP server, considering I always use end-to-end encryption in all of my chats?
Benefits: your data will be yours, no matter what apps or companies shut down. You can create as many accounts as you wish and do whatever you want among them. Bridges exist that allow you to use different chat apps all through your own XMPP server. XMPP clients are often open source and have many features.
Downsides: barely anyone uses XMPP anymore. Setting up and maintaining a server requires some work, especially with STUN/TURN. You’re responsible to prevent downtime, there’s no million or billion dollar company keeping the servers going. You need to figure out backups (both client side and server side). Playing XEP bingo to find a client that supports what you want can be a pain.
If you’re interested in bridging other chats, I’d recommend looking at Matrix instead; it’s receiving more community attention so there are more up to date bridges.
If all of your chats are end to end encrypted and you trust the server of your choice to stay online for the coming years, there shouldn’t be any downside to sticking with someone else’s server. If you have unencrypted chats (with bots you run, for example), running your own server would be more secure.
Thank you! But I’m not sure about moving to Matrix, since all of my contacts use XMPP. Also I believe I can communicate with Matrix users via bridge, if I’m correct?
You’re correct, there are Matrix -> XMPP bridges and XMPP -> Matrix bridges
There is a XMPP to Matrix bridge (aria-net.org fork of Bifrost is best), but to be honest the experience isn’t great from the XMPP side.
XMPP has Slidge now, which is arguably the better bridging system than anything Matrix currently has.
If I read the PyPi page correctly, slidge doesn’t seem to do group chats. The website itself calls it experimental.
I’m sure it’s technically superior, but without something as basic as group chat I wouldn’t even consider it comparable.
Group chats are supported in the latest version.
I see, I suppose the documentation is out of date, then. Support is looking about as feature complete as the Matrix bridges, that’s nice to know! I’m a bit confused to some of the documentation linking to XEP-0045 and some others linking to XEP-0313, but I suppose that’s part of the outdated docs then.