The blabber.im #XMPP server shuts down tomorrow.
Although we're now in the final hours, I've been working all week towards something to help. I've put up an initial version of a web-based XMPP account migrator at https://migrate.modernxmpp.org/
It's rushed and still a bit rough round the edges right now, but I really hope it is useful to people who still have data and contacts to migrate before blabber.im goes offline.
If you use it, let me know how it goes! 🙂
...and it's down. RIP blabber.im.
Note that this is just about the XMPP service, the Blabber.im app lives on, and you can still use it with other services 🙂
@muppeth
It would be good if we could work up a standard process for winding up hosted services, giving users some warning and a timeline for migrating to a new host (where technically possible). Or even a possibility for others in the community to take over admin and financial responsibility for the service.
@strypey
Agreed. Such a code would ideally be committed to ahead of time, too (it could help inform users selecting a service). For example in this case there were multiple offers of help, including reputable admins of other public XMPP services willing to bring the service under their wing, but they were declined.
@mattj
Weird. Do you know why those offers were rejected?
@wyatwerp
Hubzilla is fantastic in that respect. It would be great if @snikket_im could eventually support a similar system of cloning user accounts across multiple servers. But from what little I understand of XMPP that would require some radical changes to the protocol.
@strypey @mattj @snikket_im @wyatwerp Snikket’s way of profitting seems to be to give free server access for a couple months and letting the person who controls that instance send out many invites to use it. Then a few months later Snikket has the option of charging a fee (like ~$2/month). Seems reasonable, but if they were to make changing servers simple then they might be acting against their bottom line.
@bojkotiMalbona
Account migration is being worked on as part of Snikket: https://snikket.org/blog/dapsi-fund-account-portability/
Our hope is that (eventually) just enough people would either donate or use our hosting service, and help fund the project development. As Snikket is a not-for-profit org, any extra proceeds would get reinvested into the project, upstream projects, and improving the general ecosystem.
The goal isn't profits, just sustainably bringing communication freedom to more people.
@strypey @mattj @wyatwerp
How difficult would it be to implement something like the Zot protocol's Nomadic Identity in XMPP? So that if the server hosting my account goes down tomorrow, I can shift to a backup server with no loss of contacts, messages etc.
Could this be built on top of the @snikket_im account migration work you're currently doing?
@snikket_im @bojkotiMalbona @mattj @wyatwerp
Even so, it might even be possible to do the message and contact backup at a higher level somehow between servers, without the protocol bits.
@snikket_im
Even being for-profit doesn't automatically rule out working for social benefit. Supporting server-to-server migration of user accounts is in the roadmap for Element too, despite the fact that their main revenue source is also a hosting service. GitLab is for-profit but everything in a GL instance is a Git repo (issues boards, wikis etc), making server migration as easy as a git pull and git push.
Thanks blabber and it's author for spreading awareness about xmpp