Snikket is a FOSS project for creating private chat spaces for small groups, such as families, friends, or clubs. It doesn’t depend on a phone number, doesn’t upload address books anywhere, and doesn’t sell data to advertisers. It supports all the features you expect, including media and voice messages, audio and video calls, end-to-end encryption, group messaging, and more. Use it from multiple devices at once with the official apps, or even with unofficial, third-party apps. Snikket is easy to self-host, and professional managed hosting is also available.
Our previous sponsor, JMP, opted to donate a free week’s sponsorship to Snikket, which any paying OSNews sponsor can opt to do. This is our very small way of giving something back to the countless open source and/or smaller projects out there. Thank you Snikket for sponsoring OSNews!
Is Snikket the first truly cross-platform XMPP app?
That’s the goal. After seeing people search for “Conversations” in the iOS app store, and also people looking for an app called “XMPP”, it’s not hard to realize that branding and consistency are important to help make such a diverse ecosystem more easily approachable. We currently have Android and iOS apps, and are working on the foundations for desktop and web via a cross-platform SDK we’re building.
It’s also a fork of the Prosody XMPP service. The app and service are developed together to make sure there is consistent support for XMPP extensions on both ends.
>>> I’m not associated with the Snikket project. I’ve been following it for a while though. <<<
“Fork” might be the wrong term in this case – as the same developers work on both Prosody and Snikket, and both projects are closely related and developed together, for different audiences.
Prosody is roughly as flexible as a box of Lego bricks. Snikket is that box of bricks ready-assembled into a easy-to-use personal messaging service (plus the apps), so that you don’t have to learn the nitty-gritty details of XMPP.
I couldn’t think of a better term then fork.
A prompt for the tech philosophers out there: What is a rebranded version of something else in software development jargon?
The service and client developed in lockstep is kind of the appeal of Snikket. Unless, that has changed, I thought that was one of the goals of the project.
One word that comes to mind is “distribution”. If you’ll forgive me for borrowing the term, could something like the Snikket server be called a distribution of Prosody?
gnafuthegreat,
“Distribution” could work. “Rebrand”?
I’m not sure how much the Snikket service diverges from Prosody.
My understanding is that it’s mostly packaging up Prosody with helpful defaults/plugins and a web frontend for account management. In that way, I think it shares a lot of similarities with a Linux distribution that takes upstream projects and packages them up in a helpful way. To me, “rebrand” would be similar to a fork with minimal changes beyond the name. With all that said, this is just my own mental model and does not necessarily reflect how the Prosody/Snikket folks would want to be categorized :-).
Do we want “distribution” to be used more widely to refer to software other than Linux-based operating systems? Does that dilute the meaning of the word too much given what it’s come to be associated with? Fun stuff.
Sounds intriguing…