The XMPP Newsletter, 31 January 2019

Welcome to the XMPP newsletter.

If you have an article, tutorial or blog post you'd like us to include in the newsletter, please submit it on the XMPP wiki.

This week in Brussels we held the UI/UX Sprint, the 23rd XMPP Summit and over the weekend many XMPP developers and enthusiasts will attend FOSDEM19.

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News

The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is applying as Google Summer of Code organization and open source projects are invited to submit project ideas.

Process One has announced that they followed Basecamp's initiative and have became a Facebook-free business.

Paul Schaub has written about how the new OpenPGP for XMPP XEP solves the problem of encrypting arbitrary payload elements and therefore overcomes some of the limitations arising from OMEMO due to the fact that it only encrypts the message body.

*Diaspora developer Dennis Schubert has written an article explaining why he does not consider ActivityPub as a viable base federation layer for that project. He criticizes ActivityPub for not focusing enough on compliance and claims that following the spec doesn't guarantee interoperability with other implementations. As a positive counter-example, he presents XMPP and it's usage of XEPs and compliance specs. It's an interesting perspective from someone not directly involved with XMPP.

Anu keeps on writing regular small blog posts about develoment of the Monal client for iOs. You can read his posts for January here.

FOSDEM

Members of the Ignite Realtime, Prosody and Salut à Toi communities will be attending FOSDEM in Brussels this weekend (2nd and 3rd February).

There will also be 5 XMPP-related talks at FOSDEM this year.

Tutorials

Linus Jahn, (Kaidan) developer, explains how to set up your own Ejabberd instance using Ansible.

Mike Kuketz has written a guide in German on installing and running Ejabberd. Here's the Google Translate version.

Software releases

Clients

Converse.js has reached version 4.1.0.

Gajim versions 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 have been released.

Servers

Libraries

Other

OTR version 4 has been released. Highlights are improved deniability through "Deniable Authenticated Key Exchange" (DAKE) and improved forward secrecy by using "Double Ratcheting".