Frequently Asked Question

There are a myriad of XMPP (also known as Jabber) services available, both public and private, those who think they have to use Facebook Messenger or Googles People or whatever they want to call it today, to stay in touch have a rather limited view of the world and need to broaden their horizons, you don't have to expose your every private word to these logging, monitoring, spamming money making privacy invading conglomerates.

Note: You can no longer use third party XMPP clients to use Facebook Messenger, yeah, they rather us use their limited and very much bloated Messenger App instead.

Two decent XMPP (Jabber) clients for desktops/laptops are pidgin, nice and lean, best for Windows users,and gajim

This article is for Gajim.

We also assume since you're reading this that you have not used XMPP/Jabber before, so wont have an existing account anywhere to sign into, so we'll create a new user in our example.

Let's get started

When you install, and first run gajim, you will need to click on Accounts

You'll then be presented with a box with Add Account

Next you'll get the Welcome screen, since we assume you have not used XMPP/Jabber before we wont be logging in just yet, we need to Sign Up

The SignUP page will appear, the drop down selector offers a heap of servers to choose from, but if you have one in mind already, type it in instead, as per our other examples, we will use our private - as in unlisted server,  ims.ausics.net  no need to check the two boxes, we don't allow anonymous/guests.

Next we have our Create Registration page.

This is where we enter in our username, in this example, deletethis, also what we want to use our our name, and our email address, and lastly password - don't ever use a password you have used elsewhere before, this is a golden rule for every single website and account you create.

and Click Sign Up

If everything went smooth you should have had your account created

You can look over and customise any settings in the Account box if you want, but the defaults are more than enough, so you can just close that box now

All that's left to do now is get your good friend on and add each other, in the main Gajim window click on Accounts and Add Contact, enter their username with servername like below, click Add and wait for their acceptance.

When they accept, you will both be on each others contacts.

have fun ;)