Modern XMPP project discussion - 2021-08-27

Sam, I like your ideas with vim. I've wanted a TUI client with vim capabilities for a really long time :x

(or to add xmpp capabilities to vim, but.. maybe not?)

Scrolling through the last messages I'm reminded of one of my long term projects. - A healthy way to get Children started with technology. - Is there any XMPP client I can install on a childs tablett? - The app must be available through the Amazon App Store to make it work.

https://yaxim.org/bruno/ perhaps?

My children use Snikket happily on an old tablet. I don't know much about the Amazon app store though.

Oh, I must have mentally filtered out that last sentence.

Christian Beuschel: Daniel Gultsch once offered Conversations via the Amazon App store but as you could count the number of downloads on one hand after years, he has turned his back to it afair

This is the background: Amazons Fire Tablets are very popular for young children, because the contet (you pay mothly for it) is tailored to a childs age and everything is very restricted. To allow your child to use an App, it must be installed from the Amazon App Store.

An XMPP messenger would be ideal for a child starting to go to school. The child can practise reading and writing and stay in contact with it's friends while the parents can easily monitor the whole affair.

also: seems like Windows 11 will enable Apps from the Amazon App store

Christian Beuschel: you could kindly ask iNPUTmice whether he could update Conversations on the Amazon App store. The version from 2015 seems to be still available.

Found it. The price might be a problem though ... it is not very logical but a payed Messenger App is far less attractive. You not only have to convince the parents to buy the App, you have also convince them to convince others to buy the App.

Christian Beuschel: c'mon 2 euros

But do the kids have access to payment options at all?

Zash: dunno, but I could imagine that parents can buy it from their account for the account of their kid?

No, the kids can't even install apps. The parents initialize and manage the tablet with their Amazon Account. They install Apps and make them accessible for their child.

so you can pay amazon regularly, but an amount worth a jar of pasta sauce is too much for something you want, and that you say would be useful to your kids' learning and development?

i'm confused

I gladly pay, if Conversations is updated. I just send a mail to ask for it. Paying is not a problem, when you convince people first, that they get a lot of value. But that requires a big marketing budget. You can also give them a free app and service that they only have to pay for, if they really enjoy it. You can't however drop something they don't know in front of them and ask money for it.

Wasn't a large selling point of (early) WhatsApp that you paid for it, and thus there existed some incentive for them to treat people as customers instead of the now standard cloud exploitation target.

Actually you got WhatsApp for free and only had to pay after one year of using it. Also it was up against SMS and MMS which were really expensive. Convinience and later the size of the user base did the rest.

Uh, back when people started using WhatsApp there were already a ton of other (free) chat services.

It got released in 2009, back then you already had mobile XMPP for instance (which WhatsApp is, kind of).

> Paying is not a problem, when you convince people first, that they get a lot of value. But that requires a big marketing budget you don't need any marketing budget at all, when the convincing is done by existing users of the app ;)

But then you need existing users

i've recommended conversations to many people, and you can always tell them about the free option when not using an app store

Well there were, but WhatsApp added your contacts automaticly. It did not feel like signing up for a service and you where not reqired to find new friwnds within that service.

Thus the thing to do is to bootstrap network effects using a marketing budget

Zash: yes. and/or a free option outside the app stores

trial periods are great, but require additional code and infrastructure

cheaper than marketing campaigns with completely uncertain results though

Christian Beuschel, there's Quicksy which does exactly the same thing

You sign up via your phone number and it discovers your contacts automatically, you just need to let it read your phone book

Other than that, it's just Conversations

I can't find Quicksy on the Amazon App Store.

🤷️

I case of Google Play and F-Droid it's even free of charge. Maybe you can try to convince Daniel to publish it in Amazon app store as well, though convincing Daniel is a rather hard task :-)

Lets take one step back. I'm not looking for a WhatsApp alternative or think the way WhatsApp had success is repeatable. I want to bring XMPP to children who don't have a phone yet and have to br under the watchfull eye of their parents when using a chat app. To monitor their children the parents have to have a XMPP app as well.

That is something WhatsApp can't do. There is no real competition. But the app for the child must be available in Amazons App Store, otherwise you can't enable it to be used with a children's account.

Definitely seems like an obvious task for my Snikket to-do list :)

Christian Beuschel: Can it use some whitelisted websites in the browser? How about ConverseJS or Movim?

No there is no browser. Amazon is very keen to keep the children within their playground. You can whitelist apps and define a daily time allowence for "using apps", all of them or none at all.

Snikket in the Amazon App Store would be soo amazing! You could combine it with a hosting offer. Get your own famaliys chat service for 3,99 a month for up to twenty family members (with "firstname@lastname.family.chat" or something like that).

I'd use my own server for my family of course, but it was a lot of work and required some skill to set it up.

bad news, family.chat was registered in 2015

family. tech?

family.snikket.chat?

I think that's a really cool idea btw, I've been tossing around something similar in my head for a couple of years

the problem of 'families should have a spy-free and data-sovereign way to communicate and share media' is unsolved as far as I can tell, and very interesting

mafia.chat, familia.chat, myfamily.chat

mafia.chat is hilarious

"it's for the family" 👌 ✏

One moment ... I just got up from the floor ... I need time to be able to breath again ...

XD

Hmm, I do have familychat.me and familychat.xyz, but yeah, someone got to family.chat first :)

family.tech ?

I was trying to stay away from "it's technical"

wow mafia.chat is registered

I did not expect this

Ok, thank you so much for this talk. I have to go now and sit behind a steering wheel for a while. I'm looking forward to continuing this conversation some time soon. - Have a great evening everyone! :-)

Family chat could work with one precondition

Being available on iOS

ain't that always it

luckily, Snikket is working hard on a working iOS client :)

Really? Wow

I thought it was planned, but not in the works atm

same here. also, i18n

i mean same as in waiting for that for family use

Snikket iOS is very close (see also: https://snikket.org/blog/simply-secure-collaboration/ ). But no i18n yet sadly. It's high on the priority list after the app is otherwise functional, though.

yay!

Sorry, what means i18n

MattJ: Actually, is it based on Beagle?

internationalization. type it and see why the shorthand is very convenient :)

in this case, localization is probably the more correct term

just talking about languages

l11n then :p

emus, i18n => "internationalization", i.e. translating the app

emus, the Snikket iOS app is based on Siskin. Both Beagle and Siskin share some code, but Beagle is a desktop app.

MattJ: Whats the issue with i18n, missing translators? Missing infrastructure?

The app was just not designed for translation

All the strings are embedded directly in the code

So someone has to go through the codebase, identify and update them to be translatable

Sounds fun (/s)

> So someone has to go through the codebase, identify and update them to be translatable Has someone taken the initative yet?

No, there have been higher priority issues to tackle, and I don't know the first thing about translating iOS apps

Do you have a roadmap or a kanban board at hand to see the priorities? :)

Not a long term one

I use this one to plan up to a week: https://github.com/snikket-im/snikket-ios/projects/1

pep., l10n *

right

MattJ, excuse me if this question is inappropriate or if I'm asking in the wrong place, but how do you plan to make Snikket sustainable in terms of financial needs? I saw that you plan to provide Snikket server hosting as a service, but would the demand of it be high enough to cover the costs of continuous development?

s/of it/for it/

It looks like there's a substantial effort put into it right now, so I wonder how its development can remain on the same pace.

So far donations + grants have been working out, there also seems to be interest in the hosting service but I'm not charging anything for that while it's in beta

Most of my own time on the project was just living from my personal savings. I'm trying my best to get it to sustainability, but if it doesn't work then it doesn't work :)

(i.e. I'll have to find a real job, and Snikket will have less of my time)

But I've managed an open-source project that way for over a decade already, so I'm not too worried about the future of Snikket

Hope you’ll have another problem: finding another employee because Snikket turns out to be successful more than expected. :-) *crosses fingers*

That would be a good problem to have :)

ij, Yeah! I was trying to articulate the same idea :-)

You beat me to it

:-)

> MattJ escribió: > emus, the Snikket iOS app is based on Siskin. Both Beagle and Siskin share some code, but Beagle is a desktop app. ehh meant siskin