Comment by pikzen

I'm guessing it's a conflict between developers and management. Questions like "what protocol should we build our messaging system on top of" is an implementation detail decided on by the developers at the beginning of a product's lifespan. Stuff like handling encrypted messages gracefully is simply a developer doing their job thoroughly, not a directive from management to focus on the XMPP API. Then later in the product's life, when they want to build a platform and business integrations and sending money and all that other monetization stuff, restricting third party client access suddenly becomes important.

jabber.org doesn't accept new registrations since 2013.

If you're looking for a public XMPP server to register an account at there is a (no longer updated) list of Jabber servers at https://xmpp.net/directory.php and a more up to date list at https://list.jabber.at.

You can register an account any public XMPP server at https://conversejs.org (via the chat client in the bottom right).

Incidentally, I run the conversejs.org server which is open to registrations.

> I don't really understand why they took the XMPP API to such lengths (it even displayed OTR messages as [encrypted message], that's not really the kind of thing that comes to mind instantly when I think about an XMPP API) to finally deprecate it.

Business strategies and decisions shift constantly.

In my experience (as of about a year ago) the jabber.org servers are -I guess- seriously overloaded. Frequent disconnection or failures to login were the norm for my @jabber.org account. If I had to guess, I would bet that they're under frequent "attack", but I really have no idea.

Does anyone have any more recent information on the health of jabber.org's XMPP service?

pidgin, for all the flak it and libpurple gets, and huge backlog of feature requests and bugs, does a reasonably good job for me.