Submitted 3 weeks ago by Matty_r@programming.dev to selfhosted@lemmy.world
Hey all. I started writing an XMPP client just for learning purposes and I’m not sure on how widely used it actually is. Where is it actually used? Are there communities out there that actually use it?
Wasn’t sure where to actually post this. Sorry if its a bit off topic
To answer your question on where it’s used, have you seen providers.xmpp.net ?
(It might be worth testing your client against a few different servers…)
That’s where I found who to use, until I get to setting up prosody at home.
Lots there to take a look at. I’ll definitely be setting up unit tests to test out multiple servers for sure.
jabber.org is a major server.
Please don’t recommend jabber.org, it is super outdated and lacks almost all modern features.
Thanks, is there any indication on the number of daily users for some of those servers? Some of the IRC indexes would have usage graphs to get an idea of how popular it was.
I haven’t been using instant messaging programs much for some years, but checking https://old.reddit.com/r/xmpp/ I see:
https://www.glukhov.org/post/2025/09/xmpp-jabber-userbase-and-popularity/
This has an estimate of 13–20 million users globally for 2023, but warns that because many servers don’t publish information about their userbase, there’s necessarily uncertainty. According to it, Germany is the country with the largest userbase, followed by Russia, followed by the US.
XMPP is truly decentralized with no single point that collects this kind of data. There have been some attempts over the years, but they always failed to capture more than a fraction of the network. A recent one is more artistic in nature, probably realizing the futility of it.
The popular Conversations app has sold 100k+ units on the PlayStore, but since you can also legally get it for free, that is probably only part of the actual users.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
We have an !xmpp@slrpnk.net community here on Lemmy. Our SLRPNK instance also gives an XMPP account to every member automatically and hosts a Movim webclient for easy access.
XMPP is certainly more popular for private groups and 1:1 chatting so you will not find that many large public channels, but there is a search engine here: search.jabber.network/tags/
The JoinJabber project also has a curated list of recommended channels and communities: joinjabber.org/docs/faqs/rooms/
Matty_r@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
Awesom, thanks for that. I’ll do some digging to see how widely used it is. Cheers
ZebraGoose@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Is there a use case with bots and xmpp?
airikr@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
No bots in XMPP, please.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
What do you mean with bots in this context?