It has almost been two months since I announced slidge beta0. A lot has been fixed and improved during these two months, thanks to a few early adopters that I will never thank enough for their patience and time. All in all, it felt right to tag a new beta now.

Reactions, reactions...

I have never hidden it, I believe that emoji reactions to messages, as stupid as they may look to bearded TUI lovers, are an awesome instant messaging feature. They are a convenient way to acknowledge that you have a read a message and to signal whether you approved its content or not. The chat markers XEP proposed an acknowledgement mechanism, but as far as I know, no XMPP client ever implemented the <acknowledged> marker.

Arguably, reaction emojis offer a richer experience than a single "ack" button anyway.

Emoji permissivity

Slidge implements XEP-0444 and most plugins use this core feature of slidge. The specification is very permissive: a single chatter can react with several emojis, and can use any emoji to do so. A lot of legacy networks are much more restrictive: on signal for instance, you can only react with a single emoji; on telegram, you can only use a subset of emojis, etc.

To reflect this limitation on the XMPP end, slidge takes advantage of the privileged entity XEP, to impersonate the XMPP and adjust their reactions so that they are in sync on both ends.

Movim

Movim was the first XMPP client to implement XEP-0444, but when slidge beta0 came out, Movim didn't implement it in a way that made it possible to reflect legacy networks limitations. But edhelas was very reactive (hoho) about it, and it's now fixed, as you can see in the short clip below.

Other clients

Although not released yet, the dino team merged reaction emojis to the master branch, and I gave it a try. This lead to a few bug reports to the dino tracker, which in turn triggered some fixes in slidge to follow the specification more rigourously.

jcbrand, maintainer of the conversejs client, also dropped by the slidge MUC to say that seeing the reactions implemented in slidge motivated him to have them in conversejs too. A very pleasant surprise!

Various feature requests are opened on other client trackers, let's hope this gains traction somehow.

Roadmap

Releases

0.1.0: direct messages

I don't think I will add new features for the 0.1.0 release, except maybe, maybe some history backfilling mechanism but that is still undecided. What would be really great is having more people testing out all the different plugins. As of now, I believe only the telegram and signal plugins have been tested by others than me. Testers, please give all slidge plugins a try and share your feedback!

0.2.0: group chats

I had MUCs sort of working on the previous slidge iteration, but decided to postpone their support in order to focus on having direct messages working properly with a maintainable codebase. Since MIX seems to gain some traction, it may also be supported in 0.2.0. I have yet to dive into both specs a little more before deciding what is more appropriate to implement.

Later, maybe?

Here are some ideas that might be more than ideas someday.

Since legacy networks are likely to change their APIs, I think it would be nice to have different release cycles for slidge core and plugins. For the same reason it may also be useful to have some sort of plugin installer/updater builtin within slidge.

Slidge may enter the official debian repos someday...

Whatsapp support, probably

Amazing news: Alex started working on a slidge-whatsapp plugin. I am thrilled that someone judged slidge's code base sane enough to decide to build something on top of it!

The best library available to interact with the whatsapp network is written in Go, so most work that has been done until now was about determining how to make it possible to use it from python. Hopefully, the work put into this will help writing plugins for other networks where only go bindings are available, such as threema.

Change log

Core

PEP support

Personal eventing protocol is the modern XMPP way to advertise avatars and nicknames, slidge now supports it instead of the old vcard-temp way to set contact avatars.

This also allowed to add support for vcards over XMPP, which I think are mostly useful for phone number-based networks. Only Movim and Gajim support this XEP for now, unfortunately.

Packaging

Thanks to IGImonster and contributions from azerttyu, slidge now offers debian packages for amd64 and arm64, and even a repository so you can "apt update" your way to slidge.

The containers on dockerhub now support the ARM64 architecture (previously only amd64).

ejabberd testing and compatibilty

Thanks to the feedback of ejabberd users, various changes have been made to ensure that slidge works with ejabberd:

• all stanzas sent by slidge now have a "from" attribute. This is actually required by the spec but prosody was more relaxed about it.
• the privileged entity thing is not required anymore for slidge to work (with less features, obviously)
• the JID requesting HTTP upload slots can now be set, since ejabberd mod_http_upload does not allow the component JID to request slots.

Other changes

• a new chat command to list all legacy contacts and their puppet JIDs has been introduced (useful if not using privileged entity)
• documentation improvements: thanks CWagner, hdasch and Link Mauve for spotting the typos!
• reactions sent from official clients are now reflected on the XMPP end
• failed HTTP uploads and avatar setting issues no longer crash slidge but just trigger a warning
• instead of sending message carbons directly, slidge now sends normal message and rely on the XMPP server for sending carbons and writing messages to MAM
• contact identity type (bot, phone, etc...) are now customizable for plugins
• a lot of other small bugfixes for which I am a bit too ashamed to establish a full list

Plugins

Telegram

• Control contacts' names when using the search contact function
• Group messages are now correctly dumped
• Presence status info now matches official telegram clients
• VCard support
• fixes: composition, retraction, correction

Signal

• Group messages are now correctly dumped
• VCard support
• Handle non-existent recipient gracefully
• Puppet JIDs now use signal UUID for the user part instead of the phone number (because the phone number cannot always be retrieved)
• Add search by phone number function
• Auto add new contacts
• Fixes: handle null byte in nickname, attachments without custom filenames, unreaction

Mattermost

• Messages read markers. Contacts don't see it on mattermost, but this prevents receiving mail notifications for messages you have read but not replied to.
• Reactions have been improved (for some reason mattermost uses non standard aliases for some emojis)
• Presence information support

Discord

• Local part of contact puppet JIDs are now discord IDs instead of username + discriminator. This is a bit less sexy, but more reliable. Username+discriminator may be reintroduced at some point.
• VCard support

Facebook

• Unhandled attachments now trigger a warning

Skype

• Presence information support
• Last message correction support
• Message retraction support

Steam

• Fix reactions

That's all, folks! Grab slidge 0.1.0-beta2 from sourcehut, pypi, deb.slidge.im, or dockerhub.