Snikket ( https://snikket.org/ ) is an easier way to self-host an XMPP server. It's a pre-configured Prosody server in a docker image, and you can use it with any XMPP client you like.
> I still use Signal for most day-to-day conversations and I’m not planning to stop.
This will allow you to use your Signal account from your XMPP client.
Bridging audio / video calls isn't currently possible. But most other feature work across the gateway.
I once looked into that and it just confuses me, it’s XMPP but requires an invite? And the snikket client only works with snikket servers, yet it’s actually all based on prosody and conversations? Everything about the project has alarms going off for me.
You're supposed to self-host it (or rent a hosted instance). But rather than having open registration (or creating accounts beforehand and sending the credentials), you generate invites and send them to your contacts. The invites onboard the users to install the app.
The Snikket client works with any XMPP server, and the Snikket server works with any XMPP client.
The Snikket clients are soft forks of existing clients. The reason of their existence is having consistent branding.
In fact, I recommend using Monal as an iOS client instead of the Snikket iOS one.
Note: you can set up invites on any regular Prosody / ejabberd server.
I'm the founder of both the Prosody and Snikket projects. Sorry about triggering alarms :) I can try to explain...
Prosody is a popular choice of XMPP server software. It's used for all kinds of stuff, from self-hosted chat servers to powering Jitsi Meet, to Internet-of-Things applications.
Prosody is extremely flexible, and has a bunch of configuration options that allow you to adapt it and extend it however you want. For some people, this is ideal. Those people should continue using Prosody.
Snikket has a different scope. It is specifically an answer to a question like "How can I easily make a self-hosted WhatsApp/Signal for my family/friends using open-source software?"
- Snikket contains Prosody, for the core chat part. But it's Prosody with a very specific configuration, and the configuration is part of the project, it's not intended to be modified by the person deploying Snikket. They only need to provide the domain name.
- Snikket also includes additional components that a modern chat service needs. For example, it includes a STUN/TURN server to ensure that audio/video calls work reliably (again, preconfigured).
- Snikket provides its own apps, which are tested and developed in sync with each other and with the server. This avoids the common problem of incompatibilities that occur when you have an open ecosystem such as XMPP, where different open-source project developers may develop features at different paces, leaving users to figure out which ones support which feature. It also solves the discoverability and decision fatigue for users (searching "Snikket" on an app store will get you an app that you know is compatible with your Snikket server, you don't have to go through a list of XMPP clients and figure out which one is suitable).
- Snikket servers are not designed to be open public servers (these are an administrative nightmare). Instead, your server is closed and private by default. As the admin, you choose who signs up to your server by sending invitation links. The invitations also serve to simplify the account setup process - no need to prompt users to "choose a server", etc. They just need to provide a username.
Projects such as Conversations differ by running a single public server (conversations.im) and guiding people to sign up on that server, or choose one of a long list of free public XMPP providers. In some cases that's all what you want. But onboarding a group of people that way is not fun (for example, they all have to share their addresses with the group add each other to their contact lists one-by-one - Snikket makes discovery of contacts within the same server automatic).
Beyond these things, Snikket is all open-source and XMPP. But there is a focus on making a good polished and secure "product", if you like, rather than supporting the entire diverse XMPP ecosystem which includes a range of software of varying quality (weekend projects and more recently, 100% vibe-coded clients). For example, Snikket servers require certain security and authentication features which some older codebases that have fallen far behind modern XMPP standards (think Pidgin, etc.) simply don't support today.
> it’s actually all based on prosody and conversations?
As mentioned, I develop Prosody. I also collaborate with the Conversations developer and other XMPP projects. There's nothing shady here. The goal is just to make a best-in-class XMPP project that solves one particular use case (and it was primarily my own use case to begin with of course - I wanted to move my family off WhatsApp).
Ohh, wow. First off, thanks for prosody, been using it for several years, ever since I switched from my early 2000s jabber.org account to selfhosted.
And yeah, I get what you are saying, I'm using it the same way you envision snikket, just for my wife and I. Considering how much time I spent on the initial setup, I can very much see wanting a preconfigured version.
I guess the site was just too "non technical" and went over my head when I tried to grok it (before, a while ago, and now before writing the comment), the lack of a download option for the client on the snikket site combined with repeatably talking about invites just rubbed me wrong.
As I have already setup my server, and have gajim/conversations (which afaik are the best modern Windows/Android clients, for Windows probably even the only one storing modern xmpp) for desktop/mobile, I have no need for snikket, but my view now went from negative to very positive ;)
I'm still experimenting with the messaging on the Snikket website. However my general approach with the site was to pitch Snikket to people who don't know what XMPP is, which is, frankly, the majority of people. Instead, I wanted to focus on explaining features it enables rather than protocol details. But I'm aware it has caused a lot of head-scratching among people who already know Snikket uses XMPP :)
I see Snikket as kind of a gateway into the XMPP ecosystem for people who are unfamiliar with it. After all, if you're already familiar with XMPP then the chances are you'll probably be happier with Prosody or ejabberd, and you'll already have opinions about which clients you want to use (e.g. the upstreams of Snikket).
Yes, definitely. To me, the idea of a chat server that doesn't federate is as absurd as setting up an email server that doesn't federate. I understand that today people know more contacts with email addresses than XMPP addresses, but if we ever want to free ourselves from the current walled gardens, we need to stop treating chat as something that only happens in walled gardens.
Some people get worried about the idea of "federation", thinking that it somehow means their server is less private, and their data is being spread across a mesh of servers, and stuff like that. That's true in some decentralized/distributed chat protocols, but not in XMPP. Connections between servers only happen on-demand, similar how when you send email between different email providers, they will connect to each other to deliver the messages.
However we do have a feature which allows disabling federation access for specific accounts, for example to prevent kids from communicating with anyone outside their own Snikket server. This is a feature I want to expand on, so that you can permit communication with a limited number of approved contacts on other servers.
I am the current lead developer of Pidgin, and would like to reinforce the level of collaboration in the XMPP world. Even with Pidgin being very far behind in XMPP (and everything else) everyone has been very helpful as we're trying to catch back up and answering questions about the prosody instance we run ourselves.
This is a great explanation; Prosody/ejabberd seem to kind of be "everything to everybody" but because they are so general it's hard to know if they're a good fit for any one particular purpose.
Snikket seems to just be a focus or lens on Prosody that answers that question for the mission statement you gave.
Invite only isn't that unusual for personal/friend&family servers. The author also set that in their prosody config.
The snikket client works with many different XMPP servers, why wouldn't it? As you mentioned it's based on Conversations and for iOS on Siskin.
ejabberd is so much easier to set up than prosody, especially containerized. I would highly recommend checking multiple servers out before settling on one tbh.
> In the past, Apple has usually let you hold back on an older version and shipped security updates for all devices, not just ones that are incapable of running the new OS, but not this time.
Nah at a small scale it's totally fine, and IME pretty pain-free after you've got it running. The biggest pain points are A) It's slow, B) between auth, storage, and CI runners, you have a lot of unavoidable configuration to do, and C) it has a lot of different features so the docs are MASSIVE.
Not really. About average in terms of infrastructure maintenance. Have been running our orgs instance for 5 years or so, half that time with premium and half the time with just the open source version, running on kubernetes... ran it in AWS at first, then migrated to our own infrastructure.
> Take Venezuela for example, the UN and several NGO's have confirmed a diaspora caused by chavismo of well over 7 million people.
Huh? Chavismo began in 1999. So if you're claiming that chavismo caused a lot of migration, you'd need to come up with data that correlates with that time period.
The reality is, the big migrations from Venezuela began in 2017, which correlates with the very harsh economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Venezuela, which caused a hyper-inflation that lasted too long.
It has nothing to do with Chavismo and everything to do with American economic terrorism.
In 1998, when Chávez was first elected, the number of Venezuelans granted asylum in the United States increased between 1998 and 1999.[30] Chávez's promise to allocate more funds to the impoverished caused concern among wealthy and middle-class Venezuelans, triggering the first wave of emigrants fleeing the Bolivarian government.[31]
Additional waves of emigration occurred following the 2002 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt[32] and after Chávez's re-election in 2006.[32][33] In 2009, it was estimated that more than one million Venezuelans had emigrated in the ten years since Hugo Chávez became president.[2] According to the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), an estimated 1.5 million Venezuelans (four to six percent of the country's total population) emigrated between 1999 and 2014.[15]
The Venezuelan refugee crisis has a lot to do with Chavismo.
The graph just after the paragraph you quoted contradicts it :)
It says the number of Venezuelans living abroad was 700,000 in 2015, and it skyrocketed from that point onward.
What happened around that time?
- December 2014: Obama signed the first set of unilateral US sanctions on Venezuela
- March 2015: Obama issued an executive order classifying Venezuela as an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States"
Sure, there may have been slow migration before the sanctions, but it could have been explained by a multitude of reasons, not necessarily Chavismo.
For example, the frequent U.S.-backed riots and coups are surely a factor that encourages migration. People value security and stability.
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