Modern XMPP project discussion - 2025-08-05

General question, what jabber client for Windows is currently the most easy to use/normie friendly? I have to get a friend on Jabber but I have not used Windows in a decade.

hey, do you know any server that has transport to matrix? and for example, you can join a matrix channel and participate in discussions normally, etc.?

pjoter ejabberd

edhelas: already have found ARIA-NET.org

Hi grey, I would think gajim despite having a lot of advanced options. Dino would be better, but it's not standard to get it on windows. (need to download an. exe from github from a fork of dino)

grey: Movim

grey, I use Gajim and so does my wife on our Windows machines.

> edhelas: already have found ARIA-NET.org pjoter, as an ex-matrix user who used bifrost for a while to bridge communities, youre in for an awful experience ↺

my condolences

the ejabberd route is probably far superior, and i would be lying if i didnt say it tempted me towards ejabberd a little (i happily run prosody otherwise)

Right now the matrix_gw in Ejabberd is not really usable.

PoC level at most

~still better than bifrost~

Oy, Bifrost...

Matrix makes me sad. It's heavy on servers and that makes it harder for humans as well.

> Right now the matrix_gw in Ejabberd is not really usable. Oh ? ↺

Did someone wrote some feedback about it ?

I think they already know its limitations

I wouldn't say it's "bad", I think it's just not complete in the way someone who thinks of a "matrix gateway" might expect

> hey, do you know any server that has transport to matrix? and for example, you can join a matrix channel and participate in discussions normally, etc.? Don't bother, all brides are garbage ↺

except Biboumi! :)

We need to develop one universal protocol that covers all the other protocol use cases

You would need to make it highly xtensible /s

Someone at FOSSY mentioned MIMI and MLS will solve this.

matthew of matrix shills mimi and therefore i am weary

It's a well meant attempt, but mimi will go nowhere most likely.

Mls is cool though.

> It's a well meant attempt, but mimi will go nowhere most likely. Because nobody wants to interoperate? ↺

> Mls is cool though. There's plans to have a MLS XEP for XMPP no ? ↺

Yes

> except Biboumi! :) Garbage. Messages randomly appear on one device only, sometimes more than one. It spams me with irc log messages. It's buggy. I recently realized when connecting to irc directly that my nickname that I used with jabber was still seeb in participants, even though I left that chat like a year ago ✏ ↺

> except Biboumi! :) Garbage. Messages randomly appear on one device only, sometimes more than one. It spams me with irc log messages. It's buggy. I recently realized when connecting to irc directly that my nickname that I used with jabber was still seen in participants, even though I left that chat like a year ago ✏ ↺

thought it was already a xep lol

>> It's a well meant attempt, but mimi will go nowhere most likely. > Because nobody wants to interoperate? The big ones (WhatsApp & Apple) are doing malucious compliance, and the small ones say that interoperability would endanger their higher security standards (signal and threema). ↺

So mimi is doa

>> except Biboumi! :) > Garbage. Messages randomly appear on one device only, sometimes more than one. It spams me with irc log messages. It's buggy. I recently realized when connecting to irc directly that my nickname that I used with jabber was still seen in participants, even though I left that chat like a year ago The only advantage irc jabber Bridges offer is that they're unpopular and therefore libera retards haven't banned them yet. But that is a kind of ironic advantage that arises precisely because of how garbage it is.

Biboumi is kinda good actually

>> Garbage. Messages randomly appear on one device only, sometimes more than one. It spams me with irc log messages. It's buggy. I recently realized when connecting to irc directly that my nickname that I used with jabber was still seen in participants, even though I left that chat like a year ago > The only advantage irc jabber Bridges offer is that they're unpopular and therefore libera retards haven't banned them yet. But that is a kind of ironic advantage that arises precisely because of how garbage it is. 👎 ↺

Yeah, those issues you describe are features once you understand how it works 😅 ✏

Once you inject high doses of copamine

I just wish Biboumi supported more IRCv3

grey: for Windows check the list of clients https://xmpp.org/software/?platform=windows Here is my own recommendations: 0. Gajim is the most solid but as for me it's not ideal. But it's actively developed so it should become better in near future. 1. https://uwpx.org/ is specifically developed for Windows, nice looking but it's not developed anymore. Try it first. 2. Dino IM has a nice looking UI and have an experimental build for Win https://github.com/LAGonauta/dino/actions/runs/16550165071/artifacts/3623647796 See https://github.com/dino/dino/issues/309 for details and report issues. 3. Psi+ https://psi-im.org/downloads/ it traditionally the mostly used client on Win. It's UI and code is outdated, missing support of some new XEPs with features. I working on improving it on evenings so maybe on next version it become more usable but don't expect too much. 4. Miranda NG is one of the oldest IM clients, really bad but highly customizable. I would not recommend it. 5. Spark is also outdated and badly supported. It's written in Java and used as a corporate client that may work badly with other public servers. I would not recommend it. I made a few PRs to slightly improve it but it's maintainer is busy with other things. 6. Kaidan is listed there but I tried in on Linux. This is a modern and good client but with limited features, try it. 7. ConverseJS is a web app so you can use it from a browser. It's nice, try it anyway.

>> Because nobody wants to interoperate? > The big ones (WhatsApp & Apple) are doing malucious compliance, and the small ones say that interoperability would endanger their higher security standards (signal and threema). Figures. But what about the smaller free protocols? ↺

> 1. https://uwpx.org/ is specifically developed for Windows, nice looking but it's not developed anymore. Try it first. I would never recommend a networking software that is not being developed anymore.

It is also missing a lot of features.

It was promising when it was still developed, but now it is better not to recommend it.

Imho by far the best Windows client for beginners is Movim as a PWA.

Sadly firefox has disabled pwa on desktop, but with chromium it should work fine. ✏

Caleb Herbert: such as? IRC doesn't do federation. And I doubt Matrix or XMPP is going to implement an entirely different s2s protocol just to talk to each other.

> Imho by far the best Windows client for beginners is Movim as a PWA. As always, web taking over everything ↺

I hope Kaidan will add windows builds soon. They seem optimistic that it will work well with qt.

Its not about web taking over, its about making windows apps being a PITA for non-windows developers. Almost as bad as Apple these days.

Xmpp clearly has plenty of native Linux clients.

unsure if i would call python native =P

Only assembler is allowed. Evenything else must be bad

Sorry, assembler is not native, nor is machine code since modern CPUs are apparently virtual machines running on microcode

> As always, web taking over everything Microsoft Team is a PWA afaik :D ↺

> I hope Kaidan will add windows builds soon. They seem optimistic that it will work well with qt. Kaidan will be ready just before gnu Hurd I'm sure ↺

It has actually quite some improvements, and is active. Only not using it yet, since they gambled on mix and omemo2 and only now develop the legacy stuff. But they do🙂

MIX is The Cool Thing To Implement? 😱

No, GC3 is the hip new thing! ;)

> It has actually quite some improvements, and is active. > Only not using it yet, since they gambled on mix and omemo2 and only now develop the legacy stuff. But they do🙂 👍 ↺

> No, GC3 is the hip new thing! ;) ❗ ↺

Damn, so many trends in the XMPP universe

MIX is not cool anymore? Damn. Where did it end?

I thought MIX had some very cool features going for it

Kaidan is interesting but I think the devs are notoriously failing on the UI for a Qt app. It's almost impossible to use Kaidan with a screen reader. I feel like they're shooting themselves in the foot and they don't even know it.

Squeaky Latex Folf: well, did _you_ let them know?

I think I talked about it in their chat once

But I intend on making a bug report to several XMPP clients about it once I do more rigorous testing and get some motivation to do something again

I've been having issues with motivation lately

I've also never done programming in GTK or Qt so it's not easy for me to fix all the a11y issues

And the custom widgets don't make it easier

And let alone QML

QML is incredibly difficult

I couldn't wrap my head around it

There are very good docs to qml ✏

There are very good docs for qml ✏

Yeah but actually understanding it is a different beast ✏

I come from a WinForms background

Qt feels alienating to me

I don't think people expect PRs for all issues, but rarely do devs have a screenreader setup themselves, so they need clear bug reports on what doesn't work, otherwise they do indeed not even know that it is an issue.

commercial apps usually pay dedicated people to do a11y for compliance reasons ✏

> I think I talked about it in their chat once I don't know the QML but I used QT designer to open and change something and then checked in IDE what lines were changed and how. This makes it more clear. ↺

for Kaidan specifically I assume the issues might be rather with the Kirigami framework? Or is it a general issue with qt apps?

Damn. I didn't know jabber on Windows was in such a bad state.

I thought there was at least one fleshed out client for Windows.

Since Gajim started updating their windows builds again, it is not so bad. Only main issue with Gajim is the lack of A/V calls ✏

we were mainly talking about beginner friendly clients, which Gajim is only if people have used Slack or so before

I wouldn't say it's that bad. My wife is not technical and uses it just fine. I may have helped her set it up or log in (I forget) but she has zero issues using it.

>> I hope Kaidan will add windows builds soon. They seem optimistic that it will work well with qt. > Kaidan will be ready just before gnu Hurd I'm sure 🤣 ↺

Kaidan would be great if it supported real world group chats.

And I'm a GNOME guy.

It's in development

Nice.

(and I'm happy it's not gnome. Gnome already got dino)

I would have recommended Kaidan to my KDE friend in a heartbeat if it supported all the features for Snikket.

I feel bad recommending Dino to a KDE user.

hopefully by the end of this year or so we can finally start using Kaidan properly with MUC support and backwards compatible OMEMO

And on mobile,. All OS.... 😍. One day....

is there an update to this? https://docs.modernxmpp.org/projects/auth/

Kris, XEPs published at least, got a draft PR updating that page with those https://github.com/modernxmpp/modernxmpp/pull/64

would be nice if that could be merged. Someone just linked it on fedi and the info seems quite outdated

I think that's up to MattJ. Also I wondered if e.g. the older 'rendered' links ought to be removed.

The main missing thing is client side support, e.g. in Movim would be appropriate (so you don't have to proxy your password trough Movim)

I think the ejabberd oauth2 implementation needs some polish before Movim will consider implementing it

So no more passwords in each client? :o

The idea seems to be that mostly web clients would use OAuth2, while native clients would use regular password auth followed by FAST.

regular clients could still benefit from pass-through to link auth to another source

"log in with Codeberg"

see, that seems to be what people expect when they see this project, but it is not what it was for or what it delivered

seems feasible though

yes and such a thing also exists for prosody, yet it brings complications

re ejabberd, does it support SASL OAUTHBEARER at all? IIRC it was just the non-standard X-OAUTH2 thing that is essentially SASL PLAIN with a token

not sure

SASL OAUTHBEARER has some wonky bits that let you point to where to actually get the tokens from, while with X-OAUTH2 you are supposed to just know

there is also the option to run a proxy like this: https://github.com/lastlogin-net/obligator

I think Keycloak also supports something similar

Can you do OpenID auth with XMPP?

Or what is this for?

It's essentially OpenID Connect

https://modules.prosody.im/mod_auth_oauth_external.html is the thing that lets you hook up Prosody againts any (in theory) OAuth2/OIDC provider

uses the same sasl middleware that was made for the modernxmpp auth project, but not part of it

> Can you do OpenID auth with XMPP? server side the support is there in prosody ↺

not really useful yet due to lack of client support

so it has to fall back to PLAIN and then what JID do you put in when you e.g. login using an email address (as was the problem when testing against mastodon)

Clients would probably also need some way to know what auth options the server provides

SASL tells you that, no?

PLAIN, SCRAM-* etc -> password auth EXTERNAL -> certificate auth OAUTHBEARER -> login with OAuth2/OIDC (per XEP-0493)

No I mean: Login with Google, or Login with Codeberg etc.

and : enter the domain of your Mastodon instance to log in with that

That would be buttons on a web page after you start SASL OAUTHBEARER and find the authorization entrypoint I think

yes that might be easier

There are already such middleware so I don't think the XMPP server/layer needs some sort of multi-IdP support natively

the above linked one for example, yes

but something directly in Prosody would be nice

I don't see that fitting into SASL as it is, similar to how per-device passwords is tricky

multiple passwords is supported in Ejabbered since recently at least

SASL2 I assume

I guess we could implement a multi-backend thing with buttons in the web browser, but I can't say I want to do that atm

something that advertises multiple providers in-band would need some XEP work, was the point

> I feel bad recommending Dino to a KDE user. I feel bad recommending it to anyone ↺

I've been driving Dino as the main one. What's the better alternative here? I've got KDE on the desktop, GNOME on the laptop. ✏