On Wed, 27 Jan 2021 at 22:12, Tedd Sterr <teddst...@outlook.com> wrote: > In lieu of an official Summit, I invite all interested parties to participate > in the unofficial Slummit! > > Reply in this thread with a few short paragraphs about what you've been > working on, participating in, any projects you feel others should be made > aware of, or anything XMPP-related that you think others would find > interesting. Feel free to include a link to a longer, more detailed > description elsewhere, but provide a digestible summary first.
Ok, here's my entry... Just over 12 months ago I left full-time work to focus on building Snikket[1], which I unveiled at FOSDEM last year. Snikket began as an experiment to make a clean break from the way people currently see and talk about XMPP, and present something refreshingly modern, user-friendly and complete. Initial reception was a bit rocky - partly because I made no attempt on the website to address people who already know what XMPP is. I am squarely aiming at the other 99.9% of potential users. Some of the more amusing comments I encountered included that Snikket is "...just a rebranded Conversations", "...Prosody's enterprise edition", and (best of all) "...slimy marketing" (hey, I must be on to something!). The reality is that I'm trying to tie together a fragmented ecosystem into something that people can more easily talk about, relate to, and recommend. To help people from XMPP/developer backgrounds understand my thoughts behind the project, I gave a talk at FOSDEM this year about what led me here, and wrote it up in a blog post[2] (which actually made the front page of Hacker News last week and has received quite a bit of traffic). Another useful resource for XMPP folk is our roadmap[3]. Snikket builds upon the existing ecosystem, but it's absolutely not a one-way thing. My goal is to improve and grow XMPP as a whole. It's early days, but we've made a lot of progress. Since launch Snikket has contributed to all upstream projects: - Sponsored "easy onboarding" (XEP-0401 rev 0.3.0)/[4] in Conversations, originally just for accepting invites to a service, more recently to allow admins/users to invite new contacts from within the app. - Sponsored OMEMO support in MUC for Tigase's Siskin client for iOS [5] - Contributed easy onboarding support on the server-side to Prosody [6] Easy onboarding was not originally my idea (I think credit should go to Georg Lukas and Marc Schink), but it is *amazing*. People in this community vastly underestimate how hard it is for someone new to get from hearing "you should use XMPP" to actually registering and signing into an XMPP account. Easy onboarding/invites change all that. Because of the invitation aspect, a lot of people mistakenly assume that Snikket is some exclusive XMPP service (true story: I once got offered $100 in exchange for a Snikket invite). The reality is that the only Snikket service I run is for my family, and I encourage others to do the same :) As for the future... my goal is for Snikket to become financially sustainable (through a mixture of donations/grants/paid services). But it's nowhere near that right now, and almost everything achieved so far has been an "investment" of personal savings (I'm actually keeping an eye out for interesting/flexible/part-time work if anyone's interested). [1]: https://snikket.org/ [2]: https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/ [3]: https://snikket.org/about/goals/ [4]: https://docs.modernxmpp.org/client/invites/ [5]: https://snikket.org/blog/sponsoring-group-omemo-in-siskin/ [6]: https://blog.prosody.im/great-invitations/ _______________________________________________ Standards mailing list Info: https://mail.jabber.org/mailman/listinfo/standards Unsubscribe: standards-unsubscr...@xmpp.org _______________________________________________
