Coming home to Jabber
I used to give talks about XMPP. Back then I was sure Jabber would win — an open, federated, standards-based protocol for real-time messaging, the way email is for mail. It didn’t win. The walled gardens did, and today “chat” means a dozen incompatible silos, each with its own app demanding a slice of your phone and your attention. But the protocol never died. And lately I’ve had the itch to come home to it.