As of 20–23 New York time, if I try logging into <maemae@xmpp.social> from any European VPN server (I have tried Czech, British, Norse and German), or if I disable my VPN (from the USA), Pidgin simply tells me it is building a connexion (Verbindungsaufbau) on the bottom of the buddy list, beside the loading wheel and ‘available’ (Verfügbar) status. When I tried from an Algerian server, I had got the following message:
Translated, ‘connexion to server lost: the connexion was reset by the communication partner, with buttons to edit the account (Konto bearbeiten) or try again (Verbindung wiederherstellen). Hookipa’s website is up this time, accessible from all the VPN servers tried. The official status page reports all servers up, but does not mention XMPP. Trying to access the support chatroom (<support@chat.hookipa.net>) using another XMPP account on a different server fails, as does trying other clients to access my main XMPP account. Since I am back to sane living conditions now (see below for more on that), I am now interested more detachedly in what might have been causing these problems. Every new Jabber error message is something new to learn.maemae@xmpp.social/abgemeldet
Verbindung zum Server verloren: Die Verbindung wurde vom Kommunikationspartner zurückgesetzt
For the time being, I have logged into my old Jabber.fr account, which works fine in Pidgin, but I am still waiting for my other friends to receive, recognise and accept my friend request from the other address. One friend, an early adopter of Jabber among my friendships, had already had this account as a contact, so we have been able to talk, providing me some mental stability tonight. Another, the iPhone friend, has accepted my alternative account’s address. These are my most frequent contacts and closest friends, so my evening can now proceed about as normal through this alternative account, which I am strongly considering to make my primary. Meanwhile, my Hungarian friend reports other friends experiencing outages tonight. Jabber FR, Jabber EU, Step and Yax are apparently online as normal, while Hookipa (XMPP Social, mine), XMPP JP and Jix, as well as apparently Jabber VG, are down. What in the world could be going on?
All this said, the last few hours had been harrowing. These constant technical problems, without any warning or defence, are very bad for my mental health when they, by their nature, cut off my ability to reach out to friends for emotional support. It brought me tonight to my first panic attack (thankfully, a brief one) in weeks, after I encountered further complications trying to create jabber.vg and yax.im accounts through Pidgin and getting ‘not legitimated’ (nicht legitimiert) trying to connect to their servers. I have felt forced to scramble. At least this ordeal has shown me that it is easy to transfer Pidgin chatlogs (simple, legible HTML!) between accounts by copying them between folders, such that they can still be accessed and searched.
※Apologies if you have been observing major revisions in the hours after I first posted this. The situation and especially my knowledge of it have been developing rapidly.