XMPP at 25: The Open Standard That Refuses to Die

Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

As Europe scrambles for digital sovereignty, the author argues that true independence requires open standards, not just open-source code. XMPP, the 25-year-old messaging protocol, is held up as the ideal: a community-governed standard with multiple independent implementations, unlike walled gardens like Signal or single-vendor platforms like Matrix. The article traces XMPP's evolution, its extensions for mobile and encryption, and its quiet resilience, positioning it as the infrastructure we should have been using all along.