I've probably made 4 account's on different providers and all of them are always either not recognized on my clients, or always in a "connecting" loop.
I'm working on creating my own server using Openfire but that's going to be a while since I can get everything setup and ready.

What providers are there that are stable and recommended to use?
I'm sorry if this gets asked a lot, I'm just wondering if this is a common XMPP issue or if it's an issue on my side.

Update:
It seems that the issue was that i had some sort of aggressive DNS block list active on my VPN by accident, disabiling that seems to have fixed everything.

This is quite odd, can you give some example of clients and servers that don't work together?

Otherwise you can try the ones listed here: https://joinjabber.org/docs/servers/personal/

Ive tried 07f.de and jix.im and a couple more that I dont remember, ive found it on https://providers.xmpp.net/

Client's I use are Gajim for desktop and Conversations for Mobile.

I'm using your same clients and no problems connecting to hot-chilli.net or Disroot (so far, still not using xmpp as my main means of communication)

Can't say anything about the first one, but the second one is generally reliable and up to date. Maybe you are on a strange institutional network or public wifi that blocks the standard XMPP ports?

All I've heard about OpenFire is complaints (I don't remember specifics) and I've not yet got around to trying it out as my fourth server.

I wonder how well it works. Having a web interfaces to quickly configure it seems nice.

Or perhaps broken DNS. For example the server only listens for IPv6 and the DNS server incoreectly replies NXDOMAIN for AAAA records, as apoarently the Mullvad DoH servers do...

Perhaps easiest is to check using xmpp-dns and see what it says. :D

@roomy@lemmy.worldI Would recommend conversations.im or jabberfr.org or yax.imGenerally I've not yet had any issue with any server but I don't use the providers list and didn't try the servers you mentioned.I would not recommend the providers list. It's listing doesn't really prioritise what's actually important to a user

What kind of network are you on? If you use public wifi/corporate network, then some of them might block XMPP ports (namely :5222/tcp and :5223/tcp) and has other very restrictive firewalls