Project and server shutdown

Announcements
1

As many of you already noticed, Kontalk has been on its death path for several months now - years actually: a slow and painful death. A lot of stuff happened in these years and, being alone on the project, I’m a SPOF.

And so it failed. For a lot of different reasons.

Imminent future

While doing routine maintenance, I found out that the server had been down for a few weeks and, on starting it up, all accounts expired [^1]. Given that and the fact that the number of connected users was already very low, I’ve decided to shut down the server permanently. The server has a very old Linux distro which is also a security risk.

The forum and web sites will be online probably for a few more months. A few months after that, natural expiration of the domains will occur - although I might keep them for sentimental reasons.

Source code

The repositories on GitHub will soon be archived. Feel free to fork them.

Donations

The remaining funds went to network maintenance and to open source projects that helped Kontalk (mainly Linux, Debian and libraries).

Thanks

I’d like to thank all people that at some point were involved in the project: contributors, @tetris4 (thanks for your patience, man), the one sponsor (jmp.chat), translators, testers, (last but not least) users. It was a fun project.

[^1] it’s actually a feature built into the Kontalk server: after some time that a user doesn’t connect, their account is automatically deleted; this doesn’t take into account the down time of the server

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Thank you, @daniele_athome, for the well over decade of hard work you’ve put into Kontalk.

To the casual observer today it may not look like much today, but it did a lot of things right and was ahead of its time in many ways.

And, personally, as Our first private communications platform, and the first project that really welcomed Our contributions even though they weren’t in code, We will always look back on it fondly. (Unlike certain others that came after, but this isn’t the place for that.)

Where are you gonna be now that this project has come to a full close?

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Thank you and I’m really sorry (and sad) it had to end this way.

Where are you gonna be now that this project has come to a full close?

I haven’t stopped doing projects, although on a much smaller (and less ambitious) scale. Kontalk was too big of a project to be handled by just a handful of people (and for the little time I could personally spend for it).

EDIT: after writing my reply, I realized that maybe your question was more about what IM I will be using :smiley: I’m on Signal now. It’s still another walled garden, but I believe it’s the “lesser evil” among IM services right now.

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Maybe you remember me.

I supported Kontalk for a while by betatesing and translating :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

I loved Kontalk. It’s to bad to see the end of Kontalk.

But still I would make some promotion for another great messenger projekt I support.

Maybe you know it already. I talk about DeltaChat.A messenger basesd on IMAP/SMTP.

A nice feature are the webxdc.

@daniele_athome I wich you all the best and thank you for the time with Kontalk.

A last question: What means the name “Kontalk" ? :winking_face_with_tongue:

Bye Webratte

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Hi @webratte, of course I remember :slight_smile: thanks for your support, it meant a lot, especially because we were at very beginning of the project.

I have Delta Chat installed but I don’t use it so often (when I tell people about it they always almost say “what!? E-mails are not for that!” :smiley:)

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