# Snikket

Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/snikket/

10 people recommended Snikket in Hacker News comments, 1 had mixed feelings and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 12 months, in 8 threads. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** An out-of-the-box XMPP server and client that is easy to self-host and actively maintained. Caveat: self-hosting needs a routable IP, and mobile notifications can be unreliable.

Summary written by Claude from 21 comments.

## Why people recommend it

- Easy out-of-the-box setup for self-hosting (4 comments in the sample): "Snikket aimed to fill the gap for people who wanted an "out of the box" XMPP distribution kind of thing, and it's good at that." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49703360)) "essentially an opinionated all-in-one configuration setup based on Prosody, barely any config needed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428498)) "Really easy to set up, with sensible defaults." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49429625))
- Fits specific needs well (3 comments in the sample): "I found snikket to be pretty much perfect for the use case I wanted" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49430809)) "more likely aligned with what you are looking for" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48518912)) "This project is exactly what I hoped existed." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037763))
- Federates and works with other servers (2 comments in the sample): "a chat server that doesn't federate is as absurd as setting up an email server that doesn't federate" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47046728)) "The snikket client works with many different XMPP servers, why wouldn't it?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47036838))

## What people warn about

- Self-hosting is complex and demanding (3 comments in the sample): "Just recently I tried to self-host prosody/snikket service for a group of people" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47843622)) "running it natively on FreeBSD is complex" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49701952)) "assumes it's got a routable IP address" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49702274))

## The badge

A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged.

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Snikket", https://hackerapproved.com/p/snikket/ (10 recommend, 1 mixed, 5 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026).

Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.