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.

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 …

The initial version of our local user guide for Chinwag Social, our Mastodon instance, is now live. Getting Social You can sign up at https://social.chinwag.org/about – please let us know if there is anything else you’d like covered in the guide.

We’re still quite a long way from the slick, integrated experience I’ve got in mind as a long-term goal, but as of now there’s a really simple page you can go to for quick access to the Lobby and any other chat rooms you might want to create or use. Simply head over to https://chinwag.im/webchat/ and sign in. You’ll find yourself dropped right into the Lobby and can carry on from there.