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Title: 'The Ecosystem is Moving' a gathering with Daniel Gultsch Category: exchange with a developer slug: conversations-gultsch tags: instant messaging, conversations, xmpp
On the 1st and 2nd of June Varia will host a gathering with Daniel Gultsch.
Daniel Gultsch is the developer behind Conversations, an open source instant messaging application for Android. In 2014 he decided to work full time on Conversations and try to make a living from it. Rather than starting from scratch with Conversations, he built it as a client for the existing federated messaging protocol XMPP.
Since an XMPP messenger can, in a way, only be as good as the entire ecosystem, Daniels work on Conversations included work on expanding and improving that larger ecosystem. This work included helping to draft and implement protocol standards, such as introducing OMEMO, modern and user-friendly end-to-end encryption based on Signal's protocol. In addition he has contributed code to other XMPP servers and clients in the ecosystem to bring them up to speed and through his critical essays he has been a vocal defender of XMPP and open standards in general.
Conversations is notable because, through its singular focus on user experience, design and security it has garnered a lot of interest and revived work and interest on the XMPP ecosystem as a whole. This makes it an interesting example.
This is a chat protocol which has at one point also been the underlying technology of both Google and Facebook chat before they closed it down and made it proprietary. From the onset Conversations focused on a combination of user friendliness, security and ultimately visual design to be on par with mobile messengers such as whatsapp and telegram. The work of Conversations has reinvigorated the XMPP protocol. Partly because it focused on implementing the double-ratchett encryption algorithm almost immediately after it was open-sourced. This is the modern userfriendly end-to-end encryption algorithm developed by Moxie Marlinspike for Signal and licensed to companies like Whatsapp. Another effect of the work of Conversations is that the decades old protocol has been updated in the span of a few years to work very well for mobile usage. For me one of the interesting aspects of the development of Conversations is the role that modern thinking on UIs, design and user friendliness played in its popularity. This especially becomes apparent in the very technical and awkward world of XMPP software. The developer has mentioned multiple times that he 'bases' his design on that of his GAFA 'competitors'. Apropos tactical media, this project's appropriation of corporate design, yet very clear and solid political stance (see https://gultsch.de/objection.html) leading to an increase in popularity and community involvement is an interesting development.