crossposted from here: https://lemmy.eus/post/10482
I believe that XMPP is one of the best protocols for chat communications there is, and I stand up for it. However, the clients that there are, are not comfortable for most people out there used to apps like Telegram, Whatsapp or whatever.
One can defend current XMPP clients saying that quoting with "> " is the traditional way, or that swiping to quote a message is not worth developing; I have plenty more examples like this.
Well, if you think so, OK, use those clients for yourself, but become aware that many people won’t use XMPP for just this reason.
After saying all this, I want to tell that I am willing to develop a new, modern looking and comfortable client for XMPP. I think of a client for Android in first instance, but I would have no problem on going further.
However, I don’t know programming, so I’m searching programmers who would like to get involved in this.
Although I’m not programmer, I have experience developing software projects, from internationalization to documentation, including ideas about features, testing and all other work there can be.
Will you help me spreading the word? :)
Oh, do you think that they will listen to my proposals there? :)
We’ll listen to proposals, but can’t guarantee we’ll implement them. We try not to deviate from upstream projects more than we need to. The changes we do make we try to base on solid evidence (usability testing, for example) and whether they fit with our goals (personal messaging with open standards).
Apart from anything else, resources are limited. There is a huge long list of things I’d like to see implemented in Snikket before we consider things like having a “unique emoji pack” for example.
Whatever you do, I strongly suggest you do try to work with existing projects whenever possible (I gather you did already reach out to some). The reason I say this is that starting from scratch is not easy. Even if you build on an existing codebase there is a lot of infrastructure work and community building and such that you’ll also need to tackle. It can take years of effort to establish and grow a new project to something resembling your ambitious vision.
Whatever you do, good luck :)
Anyway, I see that it only can be used for their servers, and not a self one.
You can self host a snikket server.
It can, but requires a Prosody XMPP server setup quite similar to Snikket (which is Prosody internally).
But their forks of Conversations and Siskin are only minor changes sticking otherwise to upstream, so I highly doubt they with change much based on suggestions by users.
Actually Snikket is fully open-source and self-hostable, you can see the setup instructions in this guide.
The reason we don’t generally recommend using the Snikket apps with arbitrary XMPP servers, because part of the point of the project is making XMPP more consistent and predictable for users - i.e. you should be able to be certain that once you are set up with Snikket, all the modern features people expect will be available and work reliably.
If you use a random public server, chances are it may not support calls, or it may not support stuff required for iOS push notifications, etc. If you self-host, you need to spend time perfecting your server’s configuration, setting up the easy on-boarding flow, setting up a TURN server for calls, and so on. The Snikket server package is simply a standard XMPP server preconfigured with all these things tested and working out of the box, and a couple of other components, that’s all.
Because it’s just XMPP, you can of course use the Snikket apps with non-Snikket servers, or connect to Snikket servers with non-Snikket clients, only your mileage may vary. Since we can’t test every server and every client, but we want people to experience the very best of XMPP, we just don’t advocate this for most people.