Yes, they are. We’ve even removed many of the “essential” ones so they can’t be disabled by accident.

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 :)

not a self one

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.