A Hacker News 'Ask HN' post asks the community how they convinced non-technical family and friends to switch from SMS/WhatsApp to self-hosted XMPP or Matrix servers. The poster, a developer who tested self-hosting both protocols for a week, says the client UX felt worse than expected and found no app offering a simple SMS-like replacement. They note the main practical selling point is more consistent cross-platform messaging compared to SMS's degraded experience between iOS and Android users.
news.ycombinator.com
· 2026-11-07
Conversations, the federated Android messaging app launched in 2014 by its solo developer, is ending its paid Google Play Store distribution model. The developer says Play Store sales had served as a steady, dependable income stream for over a decade, supplementing project-based development contracts, consulting work and grants.
gultsch.de
· 2026-09-26
A blogger recounts frustrations with Signal, including missing message-edit support until late 2023, unreliable notifications, broken Do Not Disturb call handling, and inconsistent emoji rendering, despite the app's praised encryption and open-source status. The piece uses these gripes to pivot into a broader discussion of why XMPP struggles for adoption compared to alternatives like Matrix, which offers a single documented client implementation versus XMPP's fragmented extension ecosystem.
gultsch.de
· 2026-09-14
The open Jabber/XMPP protocol is celebrating a quarter-century of existence, having been designed from the start as a federated, non-proprietary alternative to closed messaging platforms. The piece uses this anniversary to argue that digital services should be treated as infrastructure owned collectively, rather than left to corporate or single-nation control.
gultsch.de
· 2026-08-24
GoKawiil