Moonbeam.town Wiki

XMPP is a simple federated instant messaging protocol that has been around for about twenty years. This protocol actually provides the foundation for a number of popular and widely-used messenger services, including Google Talk and Facebook Messenger. It is simple, lightweight, proven, and reliable. Unfortunately, it's also somewhat less user-friendly than more modern chat services such as Matrix.

Moonbeam.town has its own XMPP server because it comes with YUNoHost and I didn't see the need to disable it, but due to Matrix's greater ease of use and more-developed feature set I've decided to focus on that for building this community. Nevertheless, everyone has access to the XMPP server, and can use it for various things.

XMPP, as mentioned, is an instant messaging protocol, and that's the bottom-line of what you can do with it – you can message anyone else who has an XMPP account that's open to the internet. Additional features, such as voice and video calling or multi-user chats, are also available depending on the client software you use.

Pretty easy! You'll need to download a client app and use your Moonbeam.town credentials to sign in. Some suggestions for various platforms can be found below. Fortunately, most modern XMPP clients are smart enough to figure out how to access Moonbeam.town's XMPP server based solely on your XMPP ID, which will be the same as your Email address, which is username@moonbeam.town.

There are a number of desktop clients – Psi+, Dino, and Gajim are some examples. I use Gajim, it's fine, it has a few plugins, and it supports modern OMEMO encryption. You can get it from https://gajim.org for Windows or your friendly neighborhood software repo for Linux.

Once you've downloaded it and installed it, make sure you go to Gajim → Plugins and install the OMEMO plugin to ensure availability of secure communications.

The best client available for Android is Conversations. You can either buy it from the Google Play Store or you can get it from F-droid for free. They're the same app so it doesn't really matter which you go with – just make sure you're getting the one by Daniel Gultsch.

You bougie bastard. The program you want is called SiskinIM, from a company called Tigase. That's all I know – I don't have an iOS device with which I could run tests.

I have Conversations on my phone and so am logged in at wraidd@moonbeam.town – you can send me a message if you like, though Matrix is preferred. You can also visit https://search.jabber.network to search all publicly-available multi-user chats out there. And, of course, if you have friends with XMPP accounts, you can add them and talk to them from your Moonbeam.town account.