Introduce yourself or just say hi

Discussion
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Kontalk is proud to be a community driven project. Our community of contributors and users come from all over the world, have diverse backgrounds and a variety of specialties and experiences.

We are very interested to learn more about you! So please take the time and introduce yourself and share your thoughts on the project.

  • What is your name and where do you come from/live?
  • What are you interested in?
  • In what ways would you like to contribute to our community and the project?
  • How did you learn about Kontalk?
  • What are the main features you enjoy/miss?
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I will go first! :smile:

My name is Neofytos Kolokotronis and you can find me around the internet under my nickname tetris4. I come from Cyprus but currently live in the Netherlands.

I enjoy contributing to open source projects and am nowadays particularly interested in community building, especially enabling users’ participation and engagement. I am super excited to offer my help to Kontalk from this position.

I have been a long time contributor to Chakra, a community driven GNU/Linux distribution with an emphasis on KDE/Qt technologies and a unique half-rolling repository system. Even though I nowadays live abroad, I am also involved in several efforts in my home country; am a founding member of the local FOSS and Open technologies foundation and am very active in nurturing an Open Data/Government culture.

I first heard about Kontalk on a reddit post discussing open source messenger applications. I love how everything is fully open source, encrypted by default and distributed. I really appreciated the aims of the project and how everyone treated me when I first joined so I decided to contribute my part in the effort.

The main feature am missing at the moment is group chat, so am very eager to checkout the upcoming v4 release that will support it.

Looking forward to meet everyone!

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I’m Sylvia van Os, a Dutch computer science student interested in Free Software and Free Culture, especially music. My spare time tends to consist of socializing, writing Free Software and listening to cool Free Culture music.

Running CyanogenMod without Google Play on my phone and caring for Free Software, I found Kontalk in the F-Droid app store and decided to try it. The openness and end-to-end encryption of everything is what got me into Kontalk.

In my years of usage (going back to the Kontalk 2 days), my experience is mostly positive, although there’s always room for improvement. The main issue I have with Kontalk is currently the lack of group chats. I have no main feature I enjoy, although every now and then Kontalk does things better than other IM apps (such as showing a “mark as read” option in the notifications so there are less steps for messages that don’t need a reply).

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Hello, many of you already know me, my name is Daniele Ricci and I’m the founder of the Kontalk project.
I’m from the italian capital Rome, software engineering is my passion, especially in constrained environments such as mobile devices, but I also do web, mainly PHP and Java.

I started this project hoping that one day communication would be free for anyone and not regulated by closed protocols or networks or controlled by a single company.

I’ll follow this community development thoroughly with the help of @tetris4 and all the other supporters here that with their kind help make this project grow.

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Hi,
I’m not a man of many words.
Not only because my bad english. :wink:

Still I’m one of the german translaters of Kontalk.
I was one of the first 500 users. And I trie to Support this great project with translating and Alpha/Beta testing as good as possible.

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Hello, I’m Lupa from Paraguay so I speak Spanish. I’ve been helping to translate this great tool !!

I’m Sociologist and Sysadmin and also a CyanogenMod user like @SylvieLorxu

happy to be here !

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HI I am Wadhah Hamzah a software engineer from Yemen , I translated Kontalk to Arabic and I involved in some task regrading group chat issue , I am proud to be part of this great project .
Kontalk help me to improve my skills in Android and XMPP servers .

thank you all

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Hi,

I’m Dario, from Spain.

I’m interested in messaging protocols and have wasted the precious time of Daniele in the past.

I’m mostly lurking for now, but I’ll talk if there is something I feel I can provide to the community…

Thanks for your work :).

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Hello guys!

I’m Clemens from Austria. I’ve got a Fairphone 2 and I’m also part of the Austrian Fairphoners. Some of those community members are currently testing the Kontalk 4.0.0 Alpha 8 group chat feature, although it broke the app on one of them. I am very excited about the furure development of Kontalk (however I’m not a programmer) and I hope that it will spread quickly.

Thanks for the time you put into making this great app! :slight_smile:

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That’s me! :smiley: (Issue #862)

###About me
Hello everybody, I’m Stefan, also from Austria. @Stanzi and I learned about Kontalk at the European Fairphoners Community Trip in Amsterdam, when we tried out various messengers.

I am Christian and have been volunteering in confirmation classes for 7 years. Also I like to sing and do so at least every month at our youth masses. It’s my passion to fill young people with enthusiasm about my faith. :slight_smile:

Currently I’m studying spatial planning at the Technical University of Vienna. I’m especially interested in regional cohesion, public transport and GIS.

Fairphone is my second passion. I’ve been following the movement since the crowdfunding phase in July/August 2013 and am a proud owner of a Fairphone 1 First Edition (running a Google-free Android Kitkat). In 2014 I co-founded the Austrian Fairphoners and also became a moderator in the Fairphone Forum (Discourse is great!).

###Concerning Kontalk
What I like most about Kontalk, compared to the other IMs we tested, was the simple way of connecting with other Kontalk users. It’s just a lot easier to exchange telephone numbers stored in your address book than exchanging conventional Jabber IDs. The latter is what makes the usual XMPP client unappealing to WhatsApp user.

The one-and-only-killer-feature of instant messengers (compared to SMS and push emails) is in my opinion group chat (this is also what other people say when I try to avoid WhatsApp). That’s why I’m eagerly waiting for Kontalk 4 and contribute by testing the alpha releases - which brings me to my first sentence above. :smiley:

PS.: Just saw that milestone 4.0.0 is COMPLETE! :tada: Great work from the devs and big thank you to all the other helping to make this project a success!

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Hi everyone,

I’m the author and maintainer of the Kontalk desktop client. If you have any issues with it, criticism or praise - I’m the one responsible for it. It is not as popular as the Android client but already a good companion.

I joined this project because it is the only one which combines being Open-Souce everywhere (client, protocol, server) with well-defined and already established standards for network (XMPP) and security (PGP). Many thanks at this point, @daniele_athome, for the initial idea and all the work you have done! I’m confident this project will become more and more popular over time.

Oh, and I’m from Berlin and you can also contact me in German.

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My name is Frank Voncken, living in The Netherlands with my lovely wife and son. I was born deaf, wearing a CI since four years ago. For some years I’m a fan of open source software and the corresponding mentality. On my laptop I have Debian Testing and on my Nexus 5X with Android 7 I use apps from F-Droid as much as possible in stead of standard Google apps.

After reading positive articles about Kontalk on the open source mentality, community-driven and privacy issues I decided to use this app for chat. Unfortunately my wife is the only one for communicating with Kontalk. Friends and family members are stuck to Whatsapp. Also the sport club of my son uses Whatsapp for group communication.

It would be a big step forward if Kontalk makes the group communication possible. Another suggestion for Kontalk would be a real-time chat messaging, to see the letters appearing immediately in the receiver’s screen during typing by the sender. Such feature would approach the real life chat, and more closely to what hearing impaired people like to see in an IM app (possibly as part of Total Conversation)

Although I’m no developer in IT, or a computer scientist, I’m willing to help in some way to make Kontalk better, or to promote the app among friends. In my business communication I offer Kontalk as one of the possible ways of communication, in the hope to make this app more known to others. In any case it is a start…

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Oh wow! :smiley: Even though I expect it, am always fascinated by how diverse online open source communities can be. It seems like Kontalk is no different.
Welcome aboard everyone! Thank you for all your help to get Kontalk to this point. Hopefully this forum will enable you to be further engaged both with each other and the project.
The 4.0 release with group chatting will be a huge milestone and a great opportunity to spread the word to attract more users and contributors to our community.
Keep up the good work! :clap:

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I’m Hartmut from Ostfriesland, living in Oldenburg.
I searched for a messenger-app and read the descriptions from all I could fiind. I’m a real follower of “Open Source” (because I work with Linux at home since 1999), so it was Kontalk.
I use Kontalk with very few people (wife, friends, children).
The others have Whatsapp (I not!) too and enjoy the additional Kontalk, because they know: if Kontalk rings, it’s important and mostly family.

Spielmops

PS: If anyone wants to know, how to change Android to non-spyware, ask me (the Fairphoners know already)

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Psst! @stanzi @Spielmops We Fairphoners should prepare for the takeover of the Kontalk forum! :smiling_imp:

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… and we make Kontalk a system-app on the FP2 next to Fdroid…

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Hi, I’m Dima, I was born in Belarus and now living in Berlin so I speak Russian, Belorussian, English, German and started to learn French some months ago.

I’m maybe the technical less skilled and the youngest one (not even 18) who got here on my own.

I’ve came in contact with Open Source :heart_eyes: when I was 10 years old and got my first laptop where my father, mainly system administrator, installed Ubuntu, which I don’t like that much anymore. In that time I’ve really enjoyed the multiple desktops and especially COMPIZ.

Now I’m still using only FOSS (besides of Google Docs but it will be replaced with Nextcloud soon), Debian on my PC, Blender, OpenShot and Gimp for my “artwork”:clapper::art:, LMMS :musical_note::notes: for music and so on.

When I bought my first smartphone half a year ago I’ve tried to do it right from the beginning and the first thing I’ve done was disabling any preinstalled app which I was allowed to and then downloading F-Droid and Orbot :closed_lock_with_key:.

It took a while until I’ve found Kontalk because I’ve searched an alternative for WhatsApp but there’s no string like “whatsapp” in the description and if you type “chat” you get 35 different apps :frowning:.

After a month later I’ve learned what XMPP is, it got a little easier because there are only 8 (different+free) apps, where “XMPP encryption” has only ChatSecure, Conversations and Kontalk :slight_smile:.

I’ve dropped the 2 first very quickly after I’ve seen that ChatSecure is way to complicated to use it with “normal” people and you have to pay for Conversations.

Thats where Kontalk was just pefect! Simple interface, easy (to use) encryption and entirely open!:+1:

Even those who don’t know how to use the most simple functions in a web-browser are able to use it.

I really like Kontalk even tough the design isn’t as cool as in WhatsApp or Signal but that’s OK because it isn’t the point.

The main feature I enjoy is of course the group chat in the beta. :smile:

The main feature I miss is sending of other file types, especially videos. Maybe you should be able to set up a server of one’s own for this.

:+1:Keep going on!:+1:

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I was looking for in Syria Hussein from Google about apps development and emerged kontalk Lee jabers Protocol
It’s very pretty but if chat room system works better than the Group
And free registration number or e-mail b characters and add friends by email
I can provide you filters spam llromat and alflod if you want to add a feature chat rooms

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Hey,

I’m Paul. Like @Stanzi, @Stefan and Spielmops (I’m only allowed to mention 2 users yet) I am a Fairphoner and member of the Fairphone Forum and like @Stanzi and @Stefan I’m from Austria and part of the Austrian Fairphoners. Oh and like @Stefan I’m also a Moderator in the Fairphone Forum and Fan of Discourse.

I have decided a long time ago that Kontalk is the best option for a chat client as it is the only one that’s recommended by Prismbreak and is available from F-Droid without antifeatures.

I was the one who told @Stefan and @Stanzi about Kontalk

Unfortunately I haven’t used Kontalk much yet as most of my friends and Family don’t want to leave their walled gardens and @Stefan and @Stanzi only want to do Group chats which I hate in principle.

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