Advanced FAQ

Here you can find some in-depth questions about Jabber/XMPP.

Will my account still work 10 years from now?

XMPP/Jabber was standardized in the early 2000s (20 years ago) and some hosted services are just a few years younger. They will probably still operate a decade from now. Other servers are operated by non-profits with a sustainable model: associations promoting free-software and privacy (like April, 5July and La Quadrature), non-profit Internet Service Providers (like franciliens.net and ARN), associations dedicated to Jabber/XMPP (like jabber.fr and many others), or hosting cooperatives (like disroot). These servers have good chances to still operate ten years from now.

Other servers run by corporations, universities and enthusiasts may still operate in a decade because hosting Jabber/XMPP services requires very little resources. However, there's no way to know for sure because their economic model and incentives may not be aligned with the people that use their server. However, it is common in the Jabber/XMPP ecosystem for an operator ceasing activities to warn them a long time in advance (as there is no business incentive not to do so), so they have time to migrate to another server.

Hosting Jabber/XMPP services is not complicated for systems administrators, so the most future-proof option may be running your own server. If you are a member of a non-profit association, a cooperative, or another collective entity with a dedicated sysadmin team, consider running your own server. If your services are already handled by a third-party hosting cooperative, and you have good faith that they will continue to operate for a long time, you may ask them to host a Jabber/XMPP service for you, in addition to the usual Web/email/DNS offering.

XMPP is designed to be easily extendable and has evolved into a modern ecosystem for real-time messaging in recent years. If you have bad memories from a decade ago, you should give it a try again. Some older clients don't have all the features one would expect from a modern messenger, but those advertised on our homepage should be satisfactory. Please let us know if that is not the case.

Also, XMPP being a standard protocol, all proposals are reviewed and evolved publicly, mostly on spaces hosted by the XMPP Standards Foundation. This may sound like it prevents innovation, but in fact it is quite the contrary. The specification process, however cumbersome it is, does not prevent projects (applications, servers or any other implementation) from extending existing features or implementing new ones because a new specification is not approved (yet). It merely helps other projects get up to speed if and when they want to.