Looking back to 2016. Leaping forward into 2017

Announcements
1

Kontalk 4.0.0-beta5 is here!

This year is reaching its conclusion and it’s been a great one for Kontalk:

  • Project popularity continuted to increase. More people than ever are aware of Kontalk and use it daily.
  • Community involvement is now even greater thanks to this wonderful forum that @tetris4 helped building. We have already reached 50 users in the first month of running it.
  • New features were introduced such as the long-awaited group chats and sticky conversations, in addition to many more improvements.
  • Kontalk became available in the Amazon Appstore
  • Kontalk has been translated into 19 languages thanks to the great and constant work of our users and contributors. Thank you!!

Kontalk has also contributed to the Tigase project, the XMPP server Kontalk runs on. Several patches were submitted and we also helped fix some bugs we found. I want to thank the Tigase team for their great work, without it Kontalk would probably not be possible.

But what can we look forward to in 2017?

Group chat was a great feature to introduce, yet it still has a lot of room for enhancements, so we’ll begin focusing our efforts on fixing and improving this part.

We also want to improve our integration with the XMPP global federated network. Afterall, Kontalk is a specialized XMPP client and we want our users to feel even more free to chat with users outside of Kontalk.

Some more improvements on the encryption part include conforming to the recently approved OpenPGP XEP and adding perfect forward secrecy with OMEMO, currently being reviewed by the XSF.

Video and location sharing are also long-awaited features that will see the light next year, with the help of our core developer @a.cappelli87.

And also a few other little surprises that I won’t reveal right now…

Kontalk Public Network

The KPN is always looking for new sponsors or volunteers to host new Kontalk nodes, not only to support the growing userbase, but also to offer alternatives to our users and become a little less centralized than we are now, since we still run on 1 server.
We plan to show a one-time sponsor screen when a user registers with a sponsored server, showing a brand of the sponsor and a custom notice from the sponsor.

The network itself requires money to keep going! It’s always a pleasure to see that progress bar growing: https://www.kontalk.net/
Please donate whatever you can, even small donations matter.

The Kontalk devteam wishes everyone a wonderful new year.

4 Likes
2

I also say thank you @daniele_athome for wasting your spare time to build this great network.
And espasially thank you for listening to the users and trie to make every wish come true…

And now let’s enjoy our new years Partys :tada:

2 Likes
5

Happy New Year to all the Kontalk community!

I would like to thank @daniele_athome for trusting me and giving me a chance to contribute to this project. I have been around only for a little while, but I already feel how committed he is to Kontalk. And I was excited to see that the same stands for this small atm but very engaging community!

Some things that I would personally like to focus on in 2017 are:

  • Growing this lovely community and nurturing further engagement.
  • Rework our website to feel more modern and better communicate what Kontalk is about. If there are any webdevelopers out there interested in this feel free to ping me!
  • Being more transparent with our procedures.
  • Introducing Kontalk to a wider audience.
1 Like
6

5 posts were split to a new topic: Delay in receiving messages (f-droid version)

11

2 posts were split to a new topic: Issues upgrading to beta5

12

Wow, your ambitous plans for 2017 look great. But let me ask a specific question: Does further integration with the XMPP network and implementation of OMEMO mean that it will be possible to exchange OMEMO-encrypted messages with users of Conversation? This would be really breaking news! (I myself use mostly Conversations but nevertheless I normally recommend Kontalk to others – simply because it’s ease of use.)

2 Likes
13

I don’t see why not :slight_smile:

14

Hi @daniele_athome
you mentioned in this thread you will try to implement OMEMO this year.

Do you see (because your less spare time) a chance to realize it?

I would like to build this bridge to other XMPP clients to share the userbase :+1:

15

I’m currently seeing a lot of arguments in the XMPP mailing lists about the future of OMEMO/whatever-its-name-will-be. There are disagreements on which encryption protocols to use, even I don’t have a completely clear idea of what that all is about, there is something about licences and interoperability… anyway what is clear to me is that the community (and the XSF itself) is not really stable on this yet (and it’s not really their fault actually), and I’m a bit worried about it.

In the end, I’ll probably go for OMEMO to be compatible with Conversations. It was even recently introduced into Smack so it might be easier than I think. The hard part will be the server side :slight_smile:

TL; DR: I’d like to close this for this year, but I don’t want to make any promises.

2 Likes
16

Thank you.

That sounds not really good.
An I have no much knowledge about this technical things.

But I’m sure you know what you do and I trust you and your skills.

17

However it will be realized. It would be a big jump for Kontalk and the whole XMPP Community if all (or many) XMPP useres coult chat encrypted to each other. With the favorite client.
Some people love the phone number as JID other people hate it…

I have a dream of free and secure communication outside of a iseland.

And I’m sure this dream can become true if we really want :v:️

3 Likes