[spash]

I can confirm that sadly - this exactly mirrors my own experiences with DDG XMPP. Sometimes for entire weeks I have been what looked like the only person reporting (or caring) that the XMPP servers are down (mind you that this was years ago, I can't comment on the current state of things), sometimes followed with reactions like "Oh, right... We've restarted the server, see if it works for you." at which point I gave up and moved to a self-hosted ejabberd ever since.

While nowadays most of my contacts are on private XMPP servers, I remember few having some reasonably solid experiences with https://jabber.at/ (can be also found at https://xmpp.zone/ for a better sounding domain name, which I guess matters to people who hate the now obsolete "Jabber" term). Can't from my personal experience vouch for a "good for a long period of time", but if someone is looking for at least a well established server, this should be as good start as any. Also, the news page shows they're quite serious about server updates and transparent, which is a big thumb up in my eyes.

Edit: typos