We are finally going to upgrade our #ejabberd running on conversations.im, tomorrow, Saturday May 25th.

Unfortunately we won’t be able to do this without some down times throughout the day.

You can visit https://status.conversations.im/ for a simple up/down check or follow this thread for the occasional status update / progress report. 

 Google had accepted a version of Conversations with address book integration that explicitly asks the user for consent to process the contact list locally on their device before promoting for contacts permission. Our privacy policy included explicit wording w.r.t. local processing of the contact list.

However it is unthinkable for Google that someone would request contacts permission and then *not* upload them. A few days later they changed their mind and threatened to remove the app again. 

 To celebrate Conversations being back on the Play Store and to deny Google their 15% cut I made the app free for the next ~48 hours. 😜

If you are new here: Check out #XMPP. It's federated, provider and vendor independent instant messaging. It’s great!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conversations

Or get it from #fdroid - That version even has address book integration and public channel discovery!  😂 

 As it is a long, long tradition Conversations is available for free on the Google Play store for the last week of December.

This tradition was originally born so that when I meet people at Chaos Communication Congress and they ask what I do, they have an easy way to install Conversations. In that regard it's a very special year as we are seeing the return of CCC.

However if you are meeting loved ones to celebrate something else these days that’s fine too.🎄

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conversations

#37C3 #XMPP 

 I just finished a refactor of the Jingle File Transfer code in #Conversations_im. 
The P2P file transfer code was probably one of the oldest code in Conversations.
The new code should be a lot more resilient and brings support for XEP-0343: Signaling WebRTC datachannels in Jingle¹. This means we should be able to exchange files directly with #XMPP web clients.
Due to the better NAT hole punching of WebRTC vs Socks Bytestreams we now have a higher chance of actual P2P.

¹: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0343.html 

 Maybe the real protocol extension is the friends we made along the way.