Do you want to get rid of Whatsapp, Viber & co? Do you want to use an open protocol to communicate with your friends and family? Are you interested in encrypted communication? If yes, XMPP is what you are looking for.
XMPP (or Jabber) is an open-source protocol for communication (a.k.a. chat). Many XMPP servers already exist, if you want to start using XMPP right now, you can register an account at dukgo.com. Otherwise, you can also install your own XMPP server and use it with your personal domain name, which is very nice and let you a complete control over your communication. You can even create XMPP accounts for your friends and family using your domain name. To do so, I will introduce you to the different steps to install ejabberd. Ejabberd is an open-source XMPP server written in Erlang and very well supported in Unix systems. I installed ejabberd on my server running Xubuntu and it is working very well.
1- Install ejabberd
2- Once installed, you need to modify the configuration file:
modify the line 58 to
and line 61 to
3- Finally, you need to add an admin user from the command line
restart your ejabberd server by typing
You also need to open the ports 5222, 5280 and 5269 of your server to be able to access your account from outside.
To access the admin interface of your account go to
http://[DOMAIN]:5280/admin/
4- You can then use any chat client supporting the XMPP protocol to enjoy your new account 😉
For Desktop environment you can use Adium, Pidgin or Jitsi.
For mobile platforms, I recommend GibberBot and Beem (Android, available on F-Droid) or ChatSecure (iOS) both supporting OTR.
Useful link : JabberFr wiki (in French)
Image source : XMPP logo Wikimedia Commons
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