Daniel Gultsch, developer behind the XMPP ecosystem, published an essay on August 24, 2026 marking roughly 25 years since the project now known as XMPP began as Jabber. He argues that instant messaging should be treated as infrastructure, comparable to roads, water supply, or power grids, where ownership does not need to sit with individuals but must remain structurally replaceable through open standards.

Gultsch criticizes Europe's digital sovereignty push for often just swapping American corporations for European ones instead of pursuing genuine collective ownership. He also takes aim at messengers often praised by privacy advocates, Signal, Wire, and Threema, noting they still run as walled gardens without interoperability. He flags Signal's CEO compensation of close to one million dollars a year and its reliance on AWS infrastructure as points of concern, and stresses that open-source code alone, unlike WhatsApp's closed model, does not guarantee resilience if a company like Signal shuts its servers or exits a market.

The essay contrasts standards-developing organizations such as the IETF, ISO, W3C, and Unicode Consortium, which force competing stakeholders to agree on shared specifications, with vendor-controlled APIs. Matrix, built by the company Element (formerly Riot and NewVector), gets singled out: its foundation leadership is dominated by current and former Element staff, outside contributions are hard to get merged, and the ecosystem still relies mainly on one resource-heavy reference server implementation, with a second alternative struggling to gain adoption. Element also sells closed-source plugins for performance. By comparison, JMAP, developed at Fastmail before moving to the IETF, now has at least three independent server implementations.

XMPP's own path traces back to an original RFC published in October 2004, later renamed and updated as RFC 6120 and RFC 6121 in March 2011. Its extensions, called XEPs, are coordinated by the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF). Gultsch notes that adoption has lagged behind specification at times: XEP-0198 (Stream Management), needed to prevent message loss on mobile networks, was stabilized in 2009 but only saw broad implementation around 2014-2015, years after the 2007 iPhone and 2008 HTC Dream. OMEMO (XEP-0384), XMPP's end-to-end encryption extension, gained real traction only from 2016, three years after Edward Snowden's 2013 disclosures about NSA surveillance.

Today's clients, including Dino for Linux and Conversations for Android, have added emoji reactions, cross-device read-state synchronization, and time zone indicators. Channel binding, a defense against machine-in-the-middle attacks, became relevant after a state-sponsored attack targeted the public jabber.ru server. Upcoming work covers message replies, gallery-style multi-image sharing, and OAuth support, all currently at the experimental XEP stage, alongside community discussion about updating the core RFC and bringing a revised 'XMPP 2.0' back to the IETF.

Gultsch closes by framing XMPP, which now has contributors younger than the protocol itself, as an alternative to Big Tech messaging platforms that already exists today.