Going through the press release draft.

I have exported the prosody-modules from google code to github (like countless others), downloaded mod_carbons and mod_smacks to /usr/lib/prosody/modules and enabled them. Shall update the wikies with recommended modules.

Debian packaging is confusing me a lot. I'm not gonna try to learn it now :P

Testing xmpp on diasp.in using fayad@diasp.in. @akshay I've sent you some test messages. Can you read me ?

@fayadfami no. I was offline though. Maybe offline messages aren't working.

@akshay yes it seems offline messages are not delivering. But before that you need to enable chat to your aspects under diasp.in/contacts for chat to work.

I tested with @praveenarimbrathod on poddery and it worked well. Except some of the replies were stuck in "waiting" because of offline problem.

Do you know if chat will be integrated to web interface ? So people can use it without a client, store offline messages and reply.

@akshay It was a problem with OTR not working at the other end, on Loqui IM. Not an issue with offline messages.

@praveenarimbrathod I made an attempt on writing by adding to the press release draft.

Moved the draft to https://etherpad.mozilla.org/qLFzEUVPkq.

created a non-technical version without the technical details. https://etherpad.mozilla.org/IndianWhatsAppAlternative

@vidyut your feedback would be helpful as we may still have left some technical things.

Interesting and audacious take. I think it is a good idea to push an indigenous and open source alternative.

However, it seems premature. A WhatsApp alternative that won't work on mobile phones makes no sense. Thus, you will need a different pitch, or delay the announcement till it is mobile compatible. Then you can probably push it as an alternative to mobile messaging as well as social networking.

The other aspect of WhatsApp or Viber, etc is that they recognize mobile numbers. For this to be really kickass, you need diaspora to be able to recognize registered mobile numbers and message based on them as well.

Otherwise, it is just another chat application on a social network - like Google hangouts or Facebook chat and should be pushed thus.

I may be wrong. I am only going by this document shared, and don't know more about what is going on on the developers end.

Vidyut

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I think you should give https://Quicksy.im a try. It is xmpp with phone number as username and contacts are discovered automatically, just like WhatsApp.

It works on mobile. You just need an XMPP app like conversations on Android or ChatSecure for iPhone or IM+ for Windows Phone. You can try it with your poddery.com account. WhatsApp is just chat which uses mobile number as username. While I agree its not an exact replacement, it does the same function. There is also other alternatives like TextSecure or Kontalk which recognize mobile numbers, we could offer those services in the future.

@vik The outages on Matrix (Synapse) haven't been because of insufficient resources but something else. The average memory usage has been around 4.5GB out of 8GB on the server (Synapse + diaspora*).

For XMPP, I consulted with muppeth (disroot.org admin) and their Prosody consumes around 130MB of RAM and 24MB DB size for around 200 people who are constantly online. This is extremely less compared to Synapse.

It is nice to come back to this thread after a while. I have been really busy in real life. But now I made myself more free than busy.

While indeed the issues with matrix are apparent, I think what we must realize is that matrix and xmpp solve different problems. XMPP solves the problem of private communication. But matrix solves the problem of community level communication. Matrix is a successor of IRC, while XMPP maybe a successor of SMS.

I had written down some thoughts on this in a blog post where I argued that free software communities cannot agree on their communication tools unless they resort to some kind of bridging. And this was before matrix became usable.

I've reopened the proposal to restart XMPP services. I request everyone to review and respond on it. Here's what prompted the rebuttal:

1. The storage space on the server was recently updated and we now have 150GB of storage.
2. After the storage upgrade, some maintenance and upgrades were performed on Synapse and it's tables on Postgres. We have observed a sharp increase in performance since then.
3. We have a couple more volunteers who are ready to help in managing the services that we offer. This will make sure that a single person is not bogged down with the maintenance responsibilities.
4. And finally, we are seeing a rise in XMPP use.

XMPP was re-enabled on diasp.in - thanks to @Akshay !