Building open federated communication systems requires more than publishing specifications. It demands a living ecosystem of independent implementations that actually work together. The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is a standards body, but is also the center of a development ecosystem that encompasses 5+ major servers and 20+ clients, all developed by different individuals and organizations, all highly interoperable and shipping new features at an accelerating pace.

This talk will share how all this can work at this scale and will be co-presented by a server developer and a client developer, showing how they work together to fine-tune their implementations.

We will first explain how the XSF works on its specifications, how its process has improved over the years, with proven engineering patterns that enable independent projects to build interoperable features without tight coupling (and without central coordination).

We will illustrate the talk by showing real-life collaboration examples that came to life in 2025, sharing the points of view of an ejabberd server developer and the Movim client developer.

As a conclusion, we will tease new features currently in design for 2026 and give you a glimpse at messaging federation, the XMPP way.

This talk is for people who are interested in contributing to a truly decentralized protocol design initiative or who would like to understand what they can expect from XMPP in the future, based on examples of what has been achieved in 2025.