XMPP is the End Game of Chat Protocols (2027 Edition)

It is the year 2041. Your toaster requires biometric face scan to log into it. You can't join a group chat without linking three government databases and proving [music] you're eligible to communicate. You need to submit your identification, blood type, social security number, and whole [music] pass before you authenticate to your local chat application. For those of us who just want to send hello world print to the homies, there's another option. [music] Withdraw consent from the age verification slop. Use protocols, not [music] platforms. XMPPP is the answer. What's up, guys? My [music] name is Tony, and today I'm going to give you a quick and painless guide on XMPPP. XMPPP, formerly known as Jabber, [music] is the extensible messaging and presence protocol. It is a federated instant messaging standard [music] where your server talks to all other servers, just like email. It is a very lightweight messaging protocol that has been battle tested for over 25 years. I recently made a video on Matrix, which is another open-source messaging protocol. But there are some reasons why I think XMPPP is superior. In Matrix, when you join a room, your server downloads [music] and stores the entire history of that room. If someone on a federated server posts illegal content in a room you're in, your server is now hosting it, and you are liable. Whereas [music] in XMPPP, messages are relayed in real time. Group chat, MU history stays on your server hosting that room. So your server [music] only stores messages for your users which means that no content caching there is no content caching from other servers. This is a fundamental architectural difference [music] which makes the XMPPP protocol better in my opinion. So let's jump into how to install and use XMPPP. So similar to the matrix video, I'm going to show two paths. One is the normie path, the 5-minute escape route where we're going to create a public account and then download a client. And for me, my client of choice is Gajim. As you can see here, it's similar to Discord [music] or Element in so far as it's got workspaces, it's got rooms, etc. But after I show that, I will show the self-hosting path [music] for those of you who are more enthused, if you will. So, without further ado, let's jump right into it. All right, so the first thing we're going to do is head over to xmp.org and [music] click on the getting started tab. Now, it says to download a client first and then create an account after. If you already have an account, you can just download a client and log into that account. But for the normie coming over from Discord or Telegram or what have you, we're going to scroll down here to create an account and we're going to click this public provider list here. And for us, for today's purposes, we're going to use jabers.1 here. We'll click on the English and we'll go straight to this website here, jabbers.1. We'll create an [music] account and I'm going to make that tony btw. And for the password, I'm going to do password one, two, three, and accept the privacy policy and the terms of use. And this is going to be the hardest part for me, confirming that I am a human because like I said previously, I do kind of feel like a robot in my soul here. See, this is the thing. It says find places for relaxing. So, I got to think, what would a human [music] look for when relaxing, right? Probably not a monster truck. That's probably not very relaxing for humans. Maybe [music] a couch, I guess. Maybe some chairs. Again, I'm not sure. I'm just going off of what I've read from the LLM training data that I've been kind of trained on here. So, yeah, I think humans prefer to be relaxing on these couches or whatever. So, we'll verify that. Looks like that worked out. So, once you've passed the human check, just go ahead and register that. And there we go. All right. So, the registration succeeded and we're ready to jump into a client here. So, now over back on this getting started tab here, we do see a couple options. You've got a couple browser options. Mov.js. You've got Dino and Gajim. Kajjim is my preferred client here. That's going to be on Linux native desktop here. But for the purpose of this tutorial, we're going to use converse.js just right in the browser. Now, I don't know anything about Beagle IM cuz I've never heard of this distribution of Linux. I don't know what that is. I don't know if that's MSUS or MCOS. If you have that distribution of Linux, maybe check Beagle IM out, but I can't attest to the validity of how good that's going to be as a user experience for [music] you. So, let's check out converse.js JS here today. And we see it's just a web browser client here for XMPPP chat. So let's click take me to the app. And we're going to log in with that account we just made here. It's going to be Tony by the way one jabver.1. [music] The password is going to be you know what we discussed earlier. So we'll log into that. And there [music] we go. Got this beautiful looking chat app here with no group chats or no anything. So now [music] this part is where you're going to join one of my rooms here. And I've got a general conference here. So we'll do add group chat. And the group chat [music] address is going to be Tony by the way at conference.xmP.tononybyway.com. Nickname could be Tony by the way. And we'll join that. There we go. So we're inside of this group chat here. Going to tell everybody that they're all going to get doxed in this video here. But yeah, this is the group chat here for now. It's got 15 participants in this specific room. You can add group chats here and you can join other rooms as needed and you can do a lot more than that. And that's it. You're on XMPPP. no government ID, no proprietary garbage, you're ready to go. And if you want to stop here and just use a public server, that's totally fine. But if you want to self-host your own server and have full control, I'm going to explain how to do that right now. So for me, in my situation, I have created a bridge on my XMPPP server that goes straight to the matrix server. So I can join a matrix room from an XMPP client so I can keep everything consolidated in one place. So, what that looks like in practice is I can go over to the OXWM matrix room for my XMPPP client and just start talking about OXWM. But yeah, let's jump into the setup of the XMPPP server. So, thanks to Iconic here for the B-roll, we can talk about the great things that Linux and self-hosting [music] have in general. So, for self-hosting, similar to Matrix, I have my XMPP server on the same ThinkPad in my closet. As shown previously, you can literally get a laptop from a thrift store for really cheap and restore it as needed. or you can just grab a laptop from your dad's garage or what have you. And the beautiful thing about XMPPP is that it is such a lightweight protocol that you can host it on hardware from the 1990s and it will still run fine. And the benefit of that is that you don't need a VPS. But again, if you really want to use one, that's fine, too. All you need is a domain name and an internet connection. For the operating system of the server, I'm going to be using Nyx OS today due to its ability to declare the entire server in one or two files and not have to worry about maneuvering around random EngineX config files or Synapse config files, etc. So, there will be more of a deeper dive, so to speak, on the DevOps side of things with respect to Nyxos in the future, but for today's video, I'm just going to assume you guys are already on board with the Nyx OS message. All right. So, I'm on a NixxOS machine here. And what we're going to do is we're going to add an XMPP.Nix file to our configuration. So, for me, I'm going to CD into my Nixos.files directory. And I'm just going to make XMPP.Nix. And I'm going to go into configuration.nix here and include that file into this import section here. So, let's open up this XMPP.N nix file and we'll start the process on getting this going. So we're going to define some variables here. Let's define the domain here. For me, this is going to be xmp.tonony by theway.com. And then we'll do the muk domain. So that's going to be conference.domain. And then the upload domain, it's going to be upload.domain. So we've got our variables here. And we're going to enable the procity service. So we'll do services.procity. And for procity, let's leave that empty for right now, just to kind of show what we're going to do total. So we'll do the procity service. And then we're also going to set up some networking here. So we'll do networking.firewall.allow TCP ports here. And we're going to eventually enable some ports. So this is going to be the structure of the file. We're just going to have the procity service, which is what we're going to be using for our XMPPP server. And then we're going to open up some ports here on the firewall. [music] So let's start filling this out. All right. So we're going to go ahead and enable this here. And we're going to set the admins here declaratively. So we'll do admins equals. And for me, I like to do admin at domain. So pretty common convention. Now for the SSL certificates, we're going to set theert path equal to var lib acme domain and that'll be fullchain.pm. And for the key, we're going to set the same path there, but it's just going to be key. So this will configure global SSL and TLS certificates for encrypted connections. And this is going to point to let's encrypt certificates which are managed by Acme. So we also want HTTP file sharing enabled so that users can send up to 100 megabyte files through the XMPPP server. So what we're going to do for that is do http fileshare and we're going to make the domain equal the upload domain which is [music] going to be upload.xmpp.ton by the way.com which we've declared at the top of the file. And then for the upload file size limit, we'll do upload file size limit. And that's going to be 100 * 1024 * 1024. So that'll be 100 megabytes. All right. So let's actually set up the multiuser chat room here. So that's going to be MU. So for the MU, we'll do MU. We'll do domain and we're going to set that to the MU domain. And the name of that is going to be whatever you want. So for me, I'm going to do chat rooms. And let's set restrict room creation to false. So we can actually create rooms. All right, almost done with this file here. We do want to add a virtual host block here. So we're going to do virtual hosts.domain. And for that virtual host, we're going to enable it. And we'll set the domain to domain. So it's going to be that XMPPP. Tony, by the way. Now for the SSL, we're actually going to use the same block above here for this virtual host. So we'll just paste that in. And that ensures that this virtual host has the same file path for the SSL certificates. All right. So now we need to add some modules. And these are going to be some pro city specific modules. And these are some of the ones that I like. So So we're going to definitely enable roster which will give us contact lists. We want SASL authentication so we can authenticate. We're going to set TLS to true. That's going to be an encryption module. We want dialback that is serverto-s server verification. We want disco as well. Disco is a module that allows [music] service discovery. We're going to enable carbons which is a module that allows you to synchronize messages across devices. We are going to enable PEP as well here. And [music] this is important for the personal eventing protocol giving you things like avatars, status, etc. We're going to enable MAM or message archive management. So we can have message history. We're going to keep pings alive here by enabling the ping module. And then for me, I like the admin ad hoc module because that gives us access to admin commands. And then HTTP files so we can upload files there. And that's good here for a sort of minimal module list. And a list for all these modules are going to be available here in the Pro City community module website. And I'll put a link to this list below the subscribe button. So you can take a look at this list and see if any modules apply to your server that you're going to want. And one more thing I want to do here is disable registration. So we'll turn allow registration to false. It'll make it easy so that nobody can register to your personal server. If you want to allow people to register, you can omit this part and then create accounts for other people for your server. But yeah, that looks good for the pro city service configuration. So we can move on to the Acme config and the engine X config and then we'll be good to go. So I'm just going to fold those lines here with ZF and we're going to make a group here. users.groups.serts members. We'll put proity and enginex in here. That'll create a group so both procity and engineext can read the SSL certificates. All right. So, let's move on to the Acme configuration. So, we'll do security.acme and let's set this [music] up here. So, we're going to accept the terms and then the defaults. I'm going to put Tony at Tony by the way.com. You just put your email address. For theerts, we're going to doerts.domain. And the group is going to be the search group we just made. The web route will be var lib acme acme challenge. And then the postr run it's going to be systemctl reload procity. So that means that every time the certificate is validated or refreshed the procity service will get restarted. And then to ensure that theerts are actually going to validate all the domains, let's add an extra domains flag here. We'll put the muk domain in here and the upload domain. That way we can just create one certificate that will cover all three domains. And that looks good. So we can move on to the engine X block and go from there. All right. So for engineext, we'll do services.engineext. Just going to enable that obviously. And then we will set up virtual hosts inside of this engine X here. And we'll do locations/wellnown acme challenge.root. And we're going to set that equal to var lib acme acme challenge. Let's also set a returned 404 as well because this is not a real website. So why we need an engine x web server on top of the proced server is so that we can serve the acme challenge files for let's encrypt domain verification. So we need to return 404 for any other route since it's not really a website. And yeah, that'll be it for now. If you have a matrix server already, similar to the XMPPP server, and you have a spot for well-known Acme Challenge certificate validation, you don't need to double dip and add this. I'm going to add it for this tutorial because on this machine, it's just going to be an XMPPP server. All right, last thing we need to do in this file is to open up some firewall ports here. It's going to be port 80 for the Acme Challenge, http, and then we need 443 open for the HTTPS file uploads. And then we're going to need to open 5281 for Pro Cities HTTP upload port. And then we're also going to need 5222 open for the XMPPP client connections. And then we're also going to need 5269 open for the XMPPP server federation. And yeah, with these ports open, it looks like we've got a functioning XMPPP server. So in theory, we should be able to just run a pseudo Nixos rebuild switch and we'll be good to go here. So, what I'm going to do is Nyx Flake update to make sure all my packages are up to date. All right. What I'll do here is I'll run a pseudo Nixos rebuild switch-fliles directory. And the host is Nixxos, by the way. And that looks good to go. So, looks like we didn't make any typos there. What we're going to need to do now is ensure that our Pro CD server is running and then yeah, we can go from there. So, let's do a systemctl status proced. There we go. Looks like it's active and good to go here. Now to create the account, you can do a pseudo procity add user. And you can make an account here. I'm going to make test at xmppp.tonby way.com. We're going to make a password for this user. So you already know it's going to be. So we've created a test user here, test atxP.by way.com through the procdctl command line here. And now in theory, we should be able to use a client and log in. So, I'm going to go ahead and swap over to a different machine here and show you guys what that looks like. All right. So, I've logged into test atxP.tononyby.com. And now what I can do is join a group chat. And we're going to add this group chat. It's going to be again tonybyconference.xmpp.tonbyway.com. This is just going to be Tony by the way. So, we'll join that. And there we go. We are in the group chat now. So we can just simply say, "Hey guys, I'm posting from a test account made from a live demo." And yeah, this is sent from 2027 here. So there we go. Converse.js is nice for for a browser client. Not bad. But again, I would recommend something like Gajim over that for non-leacy dros. And for more information on Gajjim, you can go to gajim.org. Click install. And again, I'm not sure what these distributions are. For Mace OS, it looks like they've got some options. Never heard of that DRO. And then for I guess this is maybe a phone distro. Not sure. They've got options for these two dros. But let's check the mainline Linux distributions here. And as you can see here, we have availability on tons of legacy dros. So for example, Arch Linux in the extra repository. Looks like Debian 14 if you're into that. We've got Forky. It's available on Debian SID as well. So yeah, lot of availability for these legacy dros. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to NYX packages. So that's available on 2511 and unstable. So that's good for us. But if you are on the other non legacy DRO, let's take a look on how to get that here. Looks like it is outdated on Geeks. So your mileage may vary with that. So I would encourage you to shoot a message to Tronda and he'll be able to assist you on setting up Gajim on Geeks. Yeah, like I said, Gajim looks pretty clean. It's got my Matrix bridge set up so I can interact with people from Matrix inside of my XMPPP client and not have to worry about managing several clients. But yeah, so that's going to wrap up the video today. You're going to have an XMPPP identity. You're going to have full federation with your entire XMPPP network. You'll have group chats that don't replicate to other servers. You're going to have file sharing with 100 megabyte uploads. You'll have message history and no liability for federated content. You know, the best part about this is you're not going to have to submit any DNA or biometric scanning information to any threeletter agency. You can just create this server and own it yourself. So, thanks so much for checking out the video. And if you have any free and open source software or Linux/BSD related software questions you'd like me to go over, just drop a comment and I will put it in the pipeline. And as always, I wouldn't be able to end the video without an obligatory Neochetch.

This is a quick and painless tutorial on how to install XMPP, and self host an XMPP server on NixOS. Thanks @Ionic1k for the b-roll from this video: https://youtu.be/vtkQiLkNgOI *XMPP Room* xmpp:tonybtw@conference.xmpp.tonybtw.com?join *Matrix:* https://matrix.to/#/%23public:tonybtw.com *Ko-Fi:* https://ko-fi.com/tonybtw *Music:* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPrgNFnbAhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy7FMagiTFk Chapters 0:00 Intro 0:37 What is XMPP? 2:07 Setup Public XMPP Account 3:31 Choose your XMPP Client 4:25 Converse.js Overview 5:40 Benefits of Self Hosting 7:03 Create XMPP.nix File 8:07 Setup Prosody Service 10:09 Add Prosody Modules 12:01 ACME Configuration 12:58 nginx Service Configuration 15:00 Verify Prosody and Create Account 16:11 Gajim Overview 18:00 Obligatory Neofetch #xmpp #linux