In June 2024, the company that owned ICQ turned it off. Twenty-eight years after the green flower first chirped its greeting, the service stopped working — not because it was broken, but because its owner decided it was time. That single event draws the line between every messaging product and a messaging language: a product can be switched off by whoever owns it. A language can’t.
This is the part of sovereign messaging that gets lost in the talk about keys and servers. Sovereignty isn’t only about who holds your data today. It’s about whether the thing you talk on can outlive its owner. XMPP is a living language — and that fact is the deepest form of freedom from Big Tech there is.
A protocol has no owner with an off switch
A messenger you rent is a product. A product has a company behind it, and a company can be bought, restructured, or simply decide its chat isn’t strategic anymore. The result is what ICQ’s users found in the spring of 2024: a notice on the website, a date in June, and a plea to migrate somewhere else. Nothing they did caused it. Nothing they could do prevented it.
XMPP is the other kind of thing. It’s an open standard — a published specification anyone can implement, not a service anyone can unplug. There is no “XMPP Inc.” that can decide the protocol stops working, and no roadmap meeting where the language gets deprecated. The standard lives because people keep implementing it, and it grows because the community keeps publishing extensions — the XEPs — that any server and any client can adopt.
That distinction isn’t abstract. It means your app can change or disappear, and the language goes on.
What “living” means for your chats
When your chat is built on a living standard, you’re never hostage to a single product’s fate:
- Your address is yours.
name@yourdomainis an identifier you hold, not a license a company can revoke. Moving to a messenger you own starts with that fact. - Your server is replaceable. The protocol is the same whether you run Prosody on a small VPS or join a server run by people you trust. If one operator disappears, the language doesn’t.
- Your client is replaceable. A standard has many clients; your conversations aren’t locked into any one of them.
- Your metadata stays yours. On a server you control, the ledger of who-you-talk-to isn’t an asset for sale.
That’s what people actually mean by freedom from Big Tech. Not a better corporate app — a category of communication that no corporation owns at all.
Proof of life
A language that’s alive keeps changing, and you can watch it happen. Infium is built on the standard — a Prosody server with MAM archives, carbons, PEP, XEP-0363 file uploads, and end-to-end encryption, where the server stores ciphertext rather than plaintext. But the most telling sign is how it evolves:
- Voice calls came back — one-to-one, WebRTC under the hood, ICQ6 Aero look on top, arriving in the v0.9.57 update in mid-October.
- The latest builds added a clean “Wipe all data” reset, so a device can be handed on without a trace.
Those aren’t a changelog; they’re evidence the language is spoken. The people running this server are the people using it, which is why the small fixes actually get made.
The honest part
A language has no customer-support hotline. Nobody is obligated to make it easy — that’s the trust decision you make when you choose who holds the keys. And if you want the full picture of what you’re gaining and giving up, the XMPP vs Signal vs WhatsApp comparison is honest about it.
Yes, sovereignty has a price. Someone runs the server. Someone backs it up. That’s the deal: you trade the off-switch for the keys.
The bottom line
ICQ didn’t die of old age. It was turned off by its owner — the one thing that can never happen to a language. Sovereign XMPP is the choice to speak something nobody owns: your identity, your server, your keys, and a protocol that will still be alive long after any company’s roadmap. Request an invite and try the live demo — no signup wall, it runs in your browser.