My local xmpp contact list is always emtpy, also when local contacts are online. In Empathy these contacts are shown, I can also accesss the contacts whith the krunner plugin. Reproducible: Always
It is a bug in telepathy-qt. This is the upstream bug: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57739
FWIW, we now work around the bug in the contact list.