When looking for an XMPP server, you should choose carefully. One of the criteria for your choice should certainly be the score of the Compliance Tester. It should be at 100%, but today this is quite common amongst many servers. Another criteria for a server could be how long the server exists. Servers that exist for a short time might be going offline as sudden as they appeared on the network.
So, how does it look with this server? How long does this server exist?
First you have to distinguish between server and domain. The XMPP server itself is quite old and runs for over a decade, using the domain jabber.windfluechter.net. The earliest mention of the server can be found in my blog:
Currently Iām running 4 domUs:
1 GB RAM: central services host (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Mailserver, IMAP/POP3)
512 MB RAM: Apache
128 MB RAM: providing shells for irc, Jabber, ā¦
256 MB RAM: a VPN gateway for a local freifunk club
The blog article is from May 28th, 2008. But when looking into non-public resources, an even older citation can be found on my harddisk. I found it in an old IRC log, asking someone on the IRC if we can test server-to-server connection of my XMPP server and see if it is working (German):
ā Log opened Wed Nov 14 18:08:18 2007
18:08 -!- Irssi: Starting query in ircnet with <nickname_redacted>
18:08 ij@jabber.windfluechter.net ā ich wuerde naemlich auch gerne wissen, ob mein s2s funktioniert š
18:10 danke
ā Log closed Wed Nov 14 18:15:27 2007
So far I haven’t found any older proofs of the age of the server. But it seems that my server is rather old. Jabber was called Jabber at that time, because it was before the time when Cisco bought the trademark and Jabber got renamed to XMPP.
Back in those times I started running the ejabberd server software in an early version. This version wasn’t really nice to administrate – or I was too unexperienced configuring ejabberd. However, at some time I switched from ejabberd to Openfire, which is a XMPP server written in Java. The administration UI was a real improvement compared to ejabberd, but due to the nature of Java the software was using quite a lot of resources. Therefor the period of running the XMPP service with Openfire came to an end at some time and I switched to Prosody.
Prosody is easily extendable by additional modules and uses less resources than Openfire. I was running the server with Prosody for very long period unter the domain jabber.windfluechter.net and eventually more and more domains were added. In the end there were 11 domains.
In January 2020 I migrated from Prosody back to ejabberd, because the configure of that many domains and components in Prosody was too compley and prone to errors for my liking. Additionally there seemed to be a memory leak in some random module that resulted in server outages. The migration to ejabberd was quite flawless and since then the server runs without issues and hosts 12 domains, some of older domains went away and some others were added. The user count is rising, although this is hard to judge as all Friendica users on Nerdica.net and all Mastodon users on Nerdculture.de can use XMPP with their accounts These two domains alone represent approx. 2000 potential users. Today the server itself is running on hostname jabber.windfluechter.net!
| Domain | Registration |
| bandpath.net | November 2014 |
| hookipa.net | August 2019 |
| nerdculture.de | May 2015 |
| nerdica.net | March 2013 |
| nerdwind.de | October 2011 |
| windfluechter.org | August 2019 |
| xmpp.social | December 2020 |