Chinwag in 2018

Happy New Year, for a start! Hope you’re having a good one so far!

In a couple of months, it’ll be three years since Chinwag went live. It started out as a tutorial on how to set up your own XMPP server, and I nearly shut it down at the end of writing that. Instead, I left it running and it started attracting users almost immediately. I got a lot of positive feedback as I don’t do things that lead to a lot of downtime, even if I do occasionally reboot things to enable a feature that really should go through some kind of testing first …

Chinwag has also changed over the last few years from being exclusively a host for XMPP messaging, to add Chinwag Images, and most recently Chinwag Social, a Mastodon instance in a large and growing federated network. This has started to make the whole question of “What is Chinwag?” keep coming up in my mind and looking for an answer.

This is the year I hope to figure that out! I know one thing I’d really like is a bit more centralisation of accounts, and looking for a good back end to base a common set of credentials on for all services would be a good start. While centralising the accounts here, I’m always keen to learn more about other decentralised services on the net, and which ones would be cool to participate in. I’d like to get more Australians out on these networks, so figuring out how to actually publicise open and free services is something I’m thinking about.

I’ve also obtained the domain chinwag.org, and services will be transitioning to that from chinwag.im over this year. Maybe with the exception of the XMPP service, which I might leave on the .im domain as a standalone service for those who want simple messaging services and nothing else.

I hope you’ll come hang out on Chinwag Social if you want to have a chat with me about what this little corner of the net can do for you.