I finally took time to setup a forge and some old drafts turned up. I am publishing one of them today as is even though it’s 4 years old (2018-08-07T13:27:43+01:00). I’m not as grumpy as I was at the time but I still think this applies. Today I am grumpy at people’s expectation of a free software project, about versioning and releases. I am mostly concerned about applications rather than libraries in this article but I am sure some of this would apply to libraries as well. Read more

I was interested in knowing what kind of threat model people had when using XMPP, so I asked on the newly created XMPP-related community forum – which uses Lemmy! A decentralized alternative to Reddit using Activity Pub. I had an idea for myself, but I didn’t realize it was going to be this long an answer. So I decided to write it down here instead. I’ll be posting the link there. Read more

Releases have happened recently that revolve around Poezio, a TUI (Terminal UI) client for XMPP, including Poezio itself, its backend XMPP library Slixmpp, and also the poezio and slixmpp plugins for OMEMO. Many bug fixes and improvements Examples of screenshots. Thanks jonas’ for the blue theme! Mathieui has already made a proper release note for Slixmpp and I invite you to read it! It includes many bugfixes of course, and internal changes around async handling, that may reflect on some of the APIs you are using. Read more

As an answer to the announce of the EU parliament to force some service providers to allow others to interact with them, that we call “interoperability”. Interoperability In theory, interoperability is a way to allow different networks to communicate together. And it’s great, it’s even important for emancipation, empowerment of users. I have concerns though because I think in general it makes user experience (UX) more complex, and even screws up the various efforts applications make in this domain1. Read more

Who around here hasn’t heard about the tragic and inevitable death of XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol)? It’s a pretty common topic in the community and around, often started by users of XMPP themselves missing a certain feature in one or multiple specific implementations, or users of alternative solutions. In a way this is my own version of why XMPP is or isn’t doomed. To go down this rabbit hole, we first need to set a few definitions. Read more

Another episode of the XMPP sprints series happened this weekend close to Stockholm in the Nacka prefecture, in a house we rented. Significant improvements to the sprint infra this time are sauna and crêpes! We worked together on improving a new groupchat bookmarks specification, file transfer interoperability issues, and a future landing page for new XMPP users! As usual, every developer meetup comes up with its share of bug fixes, new ideas, and improvements. Read more

Une traduction française est disponible sur le blog de JabberFR. On this weekend of Bastille day some of us gathered and worked around some interesting new features in XMPP implementations. Wisolv – tailor-made software development company – generously sponsored the venue and provided us with their office in Villeurbanne (next to Lyon). I think most of us are happy with this sprint, we managed to get quite some work done. On the agenda were DOAP, Message Reactions, Occupant-id, various fixes and discussions, also including work on a Jabber client for Haiku! Read more

TL;DR: Developers can already experiment with the slixmpp-omemo plugin. Please give us feedback on the tracker or in the channel! After almost a year since I started working on the OMEMO encryption mechanism support for Slixmpp, I am happy to finally announce a first release. I would like to get feedback. I am sure there are still plenty of things to improve, and so I encourage developers to bring out their inner vandal, break it and report their findings. Read more

This month, on August 18-19th, was held the first developer event in the XMPP community for a long time. The idea came up at the Gulaschprogrammiernacht, in Karlsruhe earlier this year, talking with Daniel Gultsch, and JC Brand. We gathered there to work on an implementation of the OMEMO encryption mechanism for Converse.js, and Poezio. Converse.js is currently seeing the changes merged. It’s taking a bit more time for Poezio, but we’ll get there. Read more

This is a translation of this article in French. Although Instant Messaging (also known as IM) has been in our everyday life for a while now, I am under the impression that we limit ourselves to old habits or features that we could update to offer our users innovative and modern services they all dream about. Here I will share some groundbreaking ideas of mine that flourished as I have worked for a few years in this field. Read more