When Chinwag first went live, we made the decision to be as current with our use of standard XMPP features as possible. We still do this. Your experience when using a Chinwag account for communication should give you the best experience possible with whatever client software you chose. However, we also recognised that not the whole federated network of servers out there in the world was totally up to date in the same way and there’s not a lot we could do about that.

It’s now a handful of days until Australia’s new metadata retention laws come into effect, and I just wanted to publish a quick note about how this does and does not affect your usage of ChinWag for messaging, as ChinWag is Australian-hosted and pitched primarily as a provider of services primarily to Australians. Firstly, the focus at ChinWag is reliable communication above all. This is not a heavily privacy-focussed server, although use of XMPP comes with some inherent advantages from requiring mandatory encryption and other privacy options for all end-users to take advantage of.