Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter covering the month of May 2021.
Many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, especially throughout the current situation, please consider to say thanks or help these projects!
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Interested in supporting the Newsletter team? Read more at the bottom.
Other than that - enjoy reading!
Newsletter translations
Translations of the XMPP Newsletter will be released here (with some delay):
- The French translation appears at jabberfr.org
- The German translation appears at anoxinon.de
- The Italian translation appeares at NicFab.it
Many thanks to the translators and their work! This is a great help to spread the news! Please join them in their work or start over with another language!
XSF Announcement
Voting the membership applications can be done via xmpp:memberbot@xmpp.org (by XSF members only). We will hold a member meeting on June 10th to formally approve the voting results. The meeting particulars are:
- Date: June 10th, 2021
- Time: 19:00 UTC
- Location: xmpp:xsf@muc.xmpp.org
- Further information: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Membership_Applications_Q2_2021
Events
XMPP Office Hours each week - Also, checkout our new YouTube channel!
Berlin XMPP Meetup (remote): Monthly Meeting of XMPP Enthusiasts in Berlin - always 2nd Wednesday of the month. Next topic will be the Curated XMPP provider list on Wednesday, 2021-06-09 18:00 CEST.
Videos
Gajim 1.4 UI/UX Preview presented by Philipp Hörist.
Articles
JC Brand, the developer behind Converse.js, the web client, blogs about the current development towards version 8.0.0 in Mergebounce: Increasing performance by batching IndexedDB writes.
Ingo Jürgensmann wrote the article The Fediverse – What About Resources? on the resources of different messaging technologies. He states that XMPP consumes a lot less hardware resources and thereby energy than comparing services.
Sumit Khanna wrote an article about moving their phone numbers from Google Hangouts/Voice to a SIP/XMPP Service by using XMPP and jmp.chat.
jmp.chat is also used by craftyguy to send test MMS to himself during mmsd development.
Vaxbot US has been shutdown after change of the situation in the USA. But the service has been deployed for Canada instead. All in all, that was an interesting approach and use of XMPP technology!
Software news
Clients and applications
Video calls in Dino are slowly coming together. Dino’s developers are already making successful OMEMO encrypted video calls. The feature is included in their nightly builds now, but there’s still further work to be done.
Gajim development News: This month brought improved Ad-Hoc commands, fixes for Gajim Portable, and new image preview capabilities. Meanwhile, work on Gajim’s next version made some progress: better code block styling, chat filters, note to myself, and much more. Also in Gajim news: Gajim celebrated its 17th birthday this month. Philipp Hörist (lovetox), maintainer of Gajim, gave a preview of the new Gajim 1.4 User Interface. Gajim is an XMPP client written in Python. It currently receives a big UI overhaul, of which the first results were presented at the XMPP Office Hours.
Kaidan 0.8 has been released with noteworthy new features, including typing notifications (Chat State Notifications) and message history synchronization (using MAM)!
“Salut à Toi” is now “Libervia”. Read more about the changes behind the curtain.
UWXP, a Microsoft Windows (UWP) client, has been released in version 0.32.0.0 with focus on MUC and MAM bugfixes.
Servers
ProcessOne published a tutorial on how to install and configure MariaDB with ejabberd.
Prosody 0.11.9 has been released: This release addresses a number of important security issues that affect most deployments of Prosody. Full details are available in a separate security advisory. We recommend that all deployments upgrade or apply the mitigations described in the advisory.
Snikket just published their May update to the Snikket server software. This includes a few security fixes from Prosody, so upgrade soon! It also now allows you to manage user roles and access levels.
Libraries
No updates on XMPP libraries reach our attention :-(
Extensions and specifications
Developers and other standards experts from around the world collaborate on these extensions, developing new specifications for emerging practices, and refining existing ways of doing things. Proposed by anybody, the particularly successful ones end up as Final or Active - depending on their type - while others are carefully archived as Deferred. This life cycle is described in XEP-0001, which contains the formal and canonical definitions for the types, states, and processes. Read more about the standards process. Communication around Standards and Extensions happens in the Standards Mailing List (online archive).
Proposed
The XEP development process starts by writing up an idea and submitting it to the XMPP Editor. Within two weeks, the Council decides whether to accept this proposal as an Experimental XEP.
- XMPP Compliance Suites 2022
- This document defines XMPP application categories for different use cases (Core, Web, IM, and Mobile), and specifies the required XEPs that client and server software needs to implement for compliance with the use cases.
New
- No new XEP this month.
Deferred
If an experimental XEP is not updated for more than twelve months, it will be moved off Experimental to Deferred. If there is another update, it will put the XEP back onto Experimental.
- No XEP deferred this month.
Updated
-
Version 0.7.0 of XEP-0373 (OpenPGP for XMPP)
- Recommend PubSub access model ‘open’ for public key data node and metadata node. (ps)
-
Version 1.3 of XEP-0013 (Flexible Offline Message Retrieval)
- Deprecate after council vote of 2021-03-31 (XEP Editor (jsc))
Last Call
Last calls are issued once everyone seems satisfied with the current XEP status. After the Council decides whether the XEP seems ready, the XMPP Editor issues a Last Call for comments. The feedback gathered during the Last Call help improving the XEP before returning it to the Council for advancement to Draft.
- No Last Call this month.
Draft
- No Draft this month.
Call for Experience
A Call For Experience - like a Last Call, is an explicit call for comments, but in this case it’s mostly directed at people who’ve implemented, and ideally deployed, the specification. The Council then votes to move it to Final.
- No Call for Experience this month.
Thanks all!
This XMPP Newsletter is produced collaboratively by the community.
Therefore many thanks to emus, Florent Zara, Goffi, jeybe, Licaon_Kter, mdosch, nicola, pmaziere, snark, wurstsalat and Ysabeau for their support and help in creation, review and translation!
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License
This newsletter is published under CC BY-SA license.
