tl;dr: XMPP, the 25-year-old open standard for instant messaging, is presented as a proven, resilient alternative to walled-garden messengers like Signal, WhatsApp, and even Matrix, which the author argues is a single-vendor pseudo-standard controlled by Element. The piece stresses that true digital sovereignty requires open standards developed by independent SDOs (like the IETF/XSF), not just open-source code, so infrastructure remains interoperable and vendor-independent. Modern XMPP clients now match proprietary competitors in features, with ongoing work on replies, OAuth, and a possible "XMPP 2.0."