A free XMPP server powered by green energy and hosted in Germany (opens in new tab)

That's neat. Only economically possible when things get to the scale of facebook or google, but really neat.

How often do you use voice+video with Facebook? Is it always voice+video or sometimes just voice?

I use Jitsi Meet links for now, for the rare time I need voice+video, because it works no matter what my contact has installed (more or less)

I wish Conversations would support the voice and video stuff, but somehow they decided against it. Otherwise Conversation is a very decent XMPP client for Android.

Try just getting one of them to sign up. You don't need to have all your friends chatting via XMPP, sometimes it's good to just have one friend that you can talk about this stuff with.

Also you don't have to use XMPP, Signal is an open source worthy alternative to WhatsApp and FB messenger.

I hope I'm incorrect, but as I understand it would be impossible to make a decent XMPP client on Android.

Any app wanting to get push messages _must_ go via Google Firebase Cloud Messaging, other processes with long running services or network connections will be killed off in favor of longer battery life.

Like Conversations?

This is something that annoys me as well... Especially since with webrtc the browser can do this native, so why is there nothi avaiable?

Woah. Friends on FB messenger sounds like lost friends. :( Sorry to hear.

As opposed to what that doesn't lock you in? I'd be curious to see how they do it. With an XMPP compatible account you could at least host with your own domain (by running your own server or using a hosted service like https://account.conversations.im/domain/), and then moving isn't too bad. If you fall under GDPR regulations you can presumably ask for a copy of your data now too, and then hand that to whatever your new provider is if you move. That being said, people don't move servers that often, so it doesn't seem like a huge deal either way to me. It could certainly be easier though. Maybe someone should write a spec for that or update one of the older ones?

The "right" way to handle this is as with email: get a domain name, and then use that for your JID. This means you can only use servers that support hosting a custom domain, but at least you can switch servers without changing your address.

Re-adding contacts is easy. Back in 2006 I used to manually prepare XML for injection into XML console in Psi in order to add all my Gadu-Gadu contacts to XMPP roster using transport. Now things like that can be easily automated thanks to XEP-0144. You could probably use XEP-0321 for it as well.

I don't see the dependency on you provider as much as a problem as how you should know which provider will be there in five years.

Furthermore, running your own server isn't as easy as it should be. I run my own ejabberd with about 20 users (mostly family) since a few years now, but the configuration still gives me headaches. It is not as complicated as mail server, but still not as easy as providing the domain name and a certificate. Maybe ejabberd is just too powerful for small/simple installations.

This isn't a problem I have. Especially if I'm running my own server.

Yes, this is resolved since yesterday. I'm still waiting to make sure it really is fixed ... but no more downtime since 2 days.

What federation issues?