Implementing Slidge into YNH as a gateway from other IM to XMPP – looking for interest & call for help

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Intro

To keep it super-simple: Slidge is a way to communicate with people on other IM networks through your XMPP (i.e Jabber) client.

Since running an XMPP server is very light on resources and YunoHost comes with one (Prosody), I think it would be great to have a YunoHost app for it. That would enable any YunoHost user (on a server with XMPP) to be able to chat on several networks via the same chat client.

Currently, it covers:

  • Matrix
  • Signal
  • Telegram
  • Whatsapp
  • Discord
  • Mattermost
  • Facebook Messenger
  • Steam chat

According to the YunoHost Apps Wishlist Slidge is in the top 20-25% requested apps for YunoHost, which is not super-popular, but nothing to scoff at.

Proposal and call for help

I propose that Slidge should get a package for YunoHost that also automatically handles the initial set-up. Ideally, it should also have a settings UI for the admin to turn on/off certain plugins settings as well as a user-facing page with instructions (or even settings) on how to set up the gateways.

I have very little experience with writing YNH packages and Slidge[1] (and I’m not a coder), but I’m willing to dedicate a bit of time to this. But if anyone else shows up, I would love to work together on getting this working.

This should not be too hard to get installed – there are (often dated) official Debian packages (e.g. matridge), up-to-date unofficial Debian packages, and PyPI packages for it. And the documentation looks like it’s not too complicated to populate with what YNH knows about your server.

@anubis already showed some interest in this, and one of the main devs of Slidge also expressed interest in helping out, even though he does not use YunoHost (yet, hehe).

Next steps

  1. if anyone has Slidge set-up on their YunoHost server, please share your experience and ideally set-up
  2. decide whether we should have a separate package for every gateway or a meta package for all with the YNH admin having control of which gateways to enable/disable on their server
  3. write an early package for Slidge
  4. anyone who is curious to try, feel free to volunteer to test the package (once it’s written) – this would be a great help

… I’m sure I missed something. Please chime in if you’re interested :slight_smile:

  1. It’s a :chicken: :clockwise_vertical_arrows: :egg: problem – I want to set up Slidge, but I’d hate to mess up my YunoHost-managed Prosody config and I’d love to have YNH handle the settings, but it currently does not. And while Slidge is packaged for Debian, the package in oldstable, is well, old. ↩︎

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Hi there! I hosted slidge during a few months last year, before signald was broken. I’m happy to see a new alternative in progress! Slidgnal seems in active development, but I don’t know if it’s working today.

I remember having trouble making adjustments for metronome (the lib creator was testing with prosody). I had trouble handling attachments and contacts sync, but it finally did work with desktop apps and Conversation app on android. However, I remember having weird behavior with notifications.

It could be cumbersome to manage different permissions, so I would propose to use one xmpp user and let the package start and stop multiple system services, but I don’t know if it’s possible that way, I’ve never implemented yunohost packages yet.

Performances gain vs Matrix were impressive. I was also interested in the project movim, but I never managed to make it work.

I’ll keep an eye on this thread and can definitely test a package or contribute to one!

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