Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks: Forgejo + XMPP

I recently decided to leave Codeberg and run my own Forgejo instance instead. After finishing the initial setup, I realized that a forge I host myself is a forge that I get to shape, and that I no longer have to settle for whatever feature set someone else considered reasonable. I can now make it truly mine, and switch on the things I have always wanted a Git host to do. The first of those things concerns the registration. Right now Forgejo, like pretty much every other forge, wants an email address and sends a verification link to it, because apparently a clicked link is still considered a proof that a human is on the other end. I, however, would much rather let people sign up with an XMPP JID instead. Partly, because an email address you can receive a link at has long stopped being a real obstacle for automated spam, so the whole email verification is less beneficial than people assume, and partly because XMPP is the superior protocol, and I would prefer my users to arrive over it…