Three Years of Chinwag!

This is just a really quick post because it’d suck to not post this on May 13, and there’s only three hours of that left where I’m sitting. Happy Birthday, Chinwag!

It’s been three whole years since the final part of the “How to set up a public XMPP server” series of articles that Chinwag was the example for was published, and it went live.

We gained a few users quite rapidly, and kept updating and adding features to stay on top of developing standards and keeping the best chat clients as well supported as possible.

We outgrew the original (very cheap) VPS we were using pretty rapidly, settling eventually at Vultr which has been working really well, while allowing us to keep things deployed on servers physically located in Australia.

While we’ve got no shortage of foreign users, providing communication services for Australians has been our primary goal the whole time, given the complete lack of anyone else really doing that. The old “jabber.org.au” service was in disrepair when we started and it’s completely vaporised as of 2018. There was no other XMPP service operating in Australia that we could find at the time, and that still seems to be the case.

While there’s no critical need for low latency that’d prevent anyone here from using a server for messaging anywhere else in the world, it’s always nice to have something local – for the sake of getting a support response if you need one, if nothing else.

Aside from XMPP, in the last year or so we’ve added Chinwag Images and Chinwag Social to scratch a couple of personal itches for services and toys to play with, which are running nicely and also are the first things we’ve moved to the new domain name chinwag.org which wasn’t available three years ago, but freed up since!

Anyway, come by the Chinwag Lobby chat room and say hello if you’re one of our users who’s been around for a while. It’d be nice to catch up.