Decentralized Protocols Keep Finding New Life in AI Tooling
XMPP turned 25 this week, and the anniversary thread is more interesting than you might expect. Several commenters are not just nostalgic: one mentioned setting up an ejabberd server a few weeks ago specifically for agent orchestration and agent-to-human workflows. The protocol's durability, federation model, and existing tooling make it a practical choice for infrastructure that needs to route messages between AI agents and humans without depending on a centralized service.
The Nostr thread runs a parallel track. Nostr's design explicitly prevents relays from forwarding messages to each other, which creates a shotgun broadcast model that is inefficient but also genuinely hard to censor or shut down. Commenters noted this tradeoff directly.
The through-line: as AI agent systems need communication infrastructure that is auditable, persistent, and not dependent on a single vendor's uptime or policy decisions, older decentralized protocols are getting a second look from a completely different angle than their original use case.
So what?
If you are building agent orchestration infrastructure, XMPP's federation model and existing client ecosystem are worth evaluating seriously, not as a nostalgic choice but as a pragmatic one. The alternative is building your own message routing layer or depending on a platform that can change its terms, as the Anthropic thread illustrates.