this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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XMPP

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XMPP (aka Jabber) is the community-owned standard for real-time federated messaging.

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Hello all,

I have been asking sorund in all platforms if anyone knows of a project to build a client with UI/UX format similar to Discord/Element/Slack but based on XMPP?

I was previously pointed to XEP-0503 which outlines the "Spaces" concept for XMPP which would enable the basic backend service to work with "Spaces" and "subchannels", but all I have found so far is Cheogram implementing it in channel info to view the set of channels hosted by a given instance/domain. It works, though not extremely reliably.

Does anyone know of a project explicitly pursing an XMPP competitor to Discord/Element?

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[–] miau@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

There isn't one.

I recently spent a few weeks looking for exaclty that and I had no look.

I've looked into XMPP, Matrix and other FOSS self hosted options. There isn't anything out there offering the exact features as discord.

Disclaimer: I don't use discord and never will. But I do game frequently with a few close friends. I have bothered them so much asking them to try a few options.

Basically their requirements were:

  • support for desktop (linux and windows)
  • support for mobile (android)
  • voice channels where you can see who's online before joining
  • means to bundle several "channels" in a group (discord spaces)

My friends complained a lot about XMPP android apps, they mentioned the options available felt unfinished and looked ugly. I understand that's just an opinion but that is important for some people. Edit: spelling

The closest thing we've found is matrix, which is what we are using. But there really is only one client that works on the desktop/webapp, which is element. For android the only one available is schildichat next (spelling probably wrong). Matrix is also very tricky because not all server implementations support audio/video. The ability of seeing who's online before joining isn't available yet.

Matrix still lacks in many other things discord has to offer. I haven't been able to get stickers working, for instance. Not a dealbreaker for my friends but others may think differently.

I am not advocating for Matrix. It is very cumbersome because it depends on having the exact server and client that works. But it is what we are using.

[–] Coopr8@kbin.earth 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I've been digging into thos heavily regarding XMPP. Good news is there is some backend development going on that will enable this, bad news is its going to take a bit of time and then the clients will have to adopt or be developed. Maybe I will try out vibecoding it, lol.

[–] miau@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's nice to hear! I would love to see XMPP get the love it deserves.

[–] Coopr8@kbin.earth 3 points 1 month ago

XOWS has the front end aesthetic down

https://github.com/iquercorb/xows?tab=readme-ov-file

and so does prose.org

neither have actual subchannel/spaces functions across multiple domains though. Hopefully easy enough to patch in with new spaces protocol when it becomes available?