XMPP Service Operators - 2025-09-06

So I don't think OFCOM would be able to do too much about small individuals who are only using XMPP for friends and family, especially if there is no inband registration

I will point out again, IANAL

> So I don't think OFCOM would be able to do too much about small individuals who are only using XMPP for friends and family, especially if there is no inband registration I don't have inband registration on my server, but is there anything stopping them from viewing all XMPP servers collectively if we somehow end up on their radar and they realise we're too small to handle individually? With the amount of technological illiteracy among some of these politicians, as well as the fact that they expect foreign service providers to follow their rules, I wouldn't be surprised if they started overreaching some more. ↺

I believe email and anything built on email technology is exempt from the OSA, probably because they know that a lot of businesses run their own Exchange servers and it would not be worth it to hunt them down. The ideal outcome would be something similar for XMPP.

A collective action against a protocol doesn't really make sense. They would need to go after some legal entity (individual or organisation). Only a small percentage of the total XMPP servers are in the UK anyway.

You're right about the email exemption. It makes no sense really.

Either email should be included or XMPP should be exempt also

Google thinks XMPP addresses are emails, surely UK govt does too? So it's legally exempt 😁

If you run an email server as well, you could probably confuse them so much that they stop bothering you.

Although I admit this makes DeltaChat very attractive in the UK 😅

> I believe email and anything built on email technology is exempt from the OSA, probably because they know that a lot of businesses run their own Exchange servers and it would not be worth it to hunt them down. The ideal outcome would be something similar for XMPP. well that is the thing, decentralised platforms are almost impossible to comply, so obviously they exempted email knowing that it wouldn't be possible to apply it to email. OSA makes it extremely difficult to host XMPP. ↺

> Google thinks XMPP addresses are emails, surely UK govt does too? So it's legally exempt 😁 You could fight this in the courts, and argue that XMPP is technically under the same exemption as it is federated like email, just the data exchange format is different. ↺

whether the court will accept the argument is another question

but trying to piggy back the email section of the legislation could work :P

> well that is the thing, decentralised platforms are almost impossible to comply, so obviously they exempted email knowing that it wouldn't be possible to apply it to email. OSA makes it extremely difficult to host XMPP. I think it will be curious to see what they do (if anything) about VPNs, as the government seems to be looking at them quite negatively right now, since they would likely be legislating the technology rather than the individual service providers at that point. The federation argument is interesting but it could be applied to Mastodon as well, and it's social media that is really at the heart of all of this. ↺