Matthew Wild

The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is a community-governed non-profit organization. It has been at the helm of the XMPP ecosystem for more than two decades. During this period, the internet and how we communicate online has changed beyond recognition. This talk is about how XMPP adapted to change, and the role that the XSF played in its continuity. We will also discuss the benefits, challenges and sustainability of open ecosystems and open networks. The second half of the talk will focus on the XMPP network. Any successful network will attract spam and abuse as it grows, and XMPP is no exception. Unfortunately, open networks are at a natural disadvantage here compared to proprietary platforms. We will share the various kinds of abuse we've seen on the XMPP network, and what the community has done to tackle each of them.

This presentation will discuss the recent work done on overhauling XMPP's authentication stage, improving reconnection performance, adding multi-factor authentication and increasing account security for users. Implementation of the new protocol in Prosody and multiple clients will be discussed.

Having been an advocate of free (as in freedom) communication systems for almost as long as I've been on the internet, the number of people I successfully converted away from proprietary networks was surprisingly low for a very long time.

In this talk I will share the lessons I have learned while trying to implement (Prosody/Snikket), document (modernxmpp.org) and promote communication freedom to people.

After nearly 8 years of development, what have we learned from developing an ambitious software project in Lua?

When Prosody began, in 2008, Lua was not an obvious choice for developing a real-time network service. Compared to alternative languages, Lua had a poor ecosystem (and some say, still has). Node.js was not yet born, and the world was not used to the idea of serious high-performance services being written in high-level "scripting" languages.

Many things have changed since that time, both in the Lua world and beyond. "Why Lua?" is no longer our top FAQ, and the Lua ecosystem has improved considerably.

We faced challenges along the way, and learned a lot. This talk examines some events in our project's history as they relate to the Lua language.

Since before its standardization by the IETF in 2003, the XMPP Standards foundation and its community has put lots of effort into protocol design, documentation and implementation. But this technical work alone is not enough to ensure the success of XMPP in the real world.

What should we be working on, as a community, to bring freedom of communication to the non-technical masses?

This talk explores the non-technical aspects of developing an open communication platform for the internet. XMPP has been continuously developed on the technical front for over 15 years, but what is our goal?

For many folk in the community, the goal is giving people the ability to communicate freely by giving them an unrestricted choice of software and service. Yet instead of outreach to those people beyond our community, our efforts are primarily poured into mailing lists, technical specifications and code. Small efforts to engage with those outside of our community and beyond our "comfort zone" of technical work can make a large difference.

We'll look at some of the work that has been, is being, and can be done by all of us to tackle today's proliferation of non-free proprietary messaging silos.