Kontalk messenger

Daniele Ricci daniele.athome at gmail.com
Fri Mar 29 14:47:19 UTC 2013


Hello! This is my first message here, I've been introduced here by a
fellow member of fsfe.org, Massimo Barbieri (thank you!).
A couple of years ago I started Kontalk[1], what I thought it could be
a community-driven instant messaging network.
For all this time, I remained "in the dark", developing this solo
project and distributing it only to people I know.
After moving to Google Code[2] a month ago, registrations started
rising quickly (also due to the Reddit[3] effect), people started
donating and showing interest to the project.
Now I'm here to introduce it to the fsf, I hope it will gain more
interest. In fact we need help and developers :-)

As I stated before, Kontalk is a community-driven instant messaging
network, built on XMPP (100% compatible - e.g. works with Pidgin, we
added a few extensions in order to make it more suitable for mobile
phones, domain federation and a couple of other things). We aim to
create a network of server nodes run by the community (that is, cheap
servers) using XMPP on the same domain (e.g. kontalk.net), based on
mobile phone number identification.
Primary concerns are democracy and security: client-side encryption,
phone numbers not going around the network, a "vote system" based on
asymmetric encryption signing, etc... a network running and managing
by itself.
Although these are all a bunch of nice words :P we do have a service
running on our own server. But it's the first release of Kontalk
server[4], using a proprietary protocol (source code is available of
course), then I decided to switch to XMPP, but both server and clients
are still under heavy development. We think we could make the "big
switch" at the end of this summer.
XMPP development is going fast, we have 2 working servers (still with
a few bugs of course) I and a few other people are testing (you're
welcome to download the very unstable alpha XMPP client from Google
Code).

Kontalk[5] is still far from being a full WhatsApp replacement: it
still lacks many features and it needs help[6], contributions and
ideas from the community.

That's it, I guess. Of course this is just an introduction, and
remember this is still an embrional solo project, so please be kind
:-)


[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kontalk
[2] http://code.google.com/p/kontalk/
[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1aqekt/an_open_source_decentralised_and_encrypted/
[4] http://code.google.com/p/kontalk/source/browse?repo=pyserver
[5] http://www.kontalk.org/
[6] http://www.kontalk.net/

--
Daniele



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