Hello,

It's been a while since my last progress note. I've been immersed in work on Libervia, with many tasks to accomplish. I'll keep this update brief.

A/V Implementation in Libervia

I'm thrilled to announce a new development that I haven't yet officially shared on this blog: Libervia has once again received a grant from NLnet, this time via the NGI Assure Fund. This funding will facilitate the implementation of A/V calls with Jingle across several frontends: Web, Desktop, and CLI. In addition to one-on-one calls, multi-party calls are in the plans. The first approach will be using XEP-0272: Multiparty Jingle (Muji), which supports Peer-to-Peer (P2P) connections between participants without the need for a specific service—ideal for a small number of participants. For larger groups, a Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) will be used, mirroring the technology used in platforms such as Jitsi Meet.

Alongside calls, we plan to offer Desktop Sharing, and even a specification and implementation for Remote Desktop Control atop XMPP!

Progress is well underway; one-on-one calls are already functional within the web frontend. However, there is still substantial work ahead.

To gain insight into the related tasks and what we've accomplished so far, you can check the associated tickets.

ActivityPub Gateway

I realize the high level of anticipation surrounding this gateway. While the gateway is operational (this blog utilizes it), it is yet to stabilize. I had hoped early adopters would install it and provide bug reports or other feedback. Unfortunately, this was not the case, with only one person (to my knowledge) having used it and provided prior feedback. This is understandable considering the requirement of an existing XMPP server, installation of a dev version of Libervia, and setting everything up. If you wish to try it out, you're welcome to join our official chat at libervia@chat.jabberfr.org (http link).

Nonetheless, I've decided to adjust my strategy. At some point, I plan to open a test instance. Due to limited resources for moderation, it will likely be invitation-only initially. The ultimate aim is to gather sufficient feedback to ensure stability.

Official Website and Test Instance

There have been several changes to the website:

• The Flatpak and Docker images appeared to be malfunctioning. I've temporarily removed them and plan to rectify this issue later. If you wish to test Libervia in the meantime, the sources remain available.

• I've added a roadmap at https://libervia.org/roadmap. Many had requested this, so here you go.

I've discontinued the libervia.org test instance, after years of service, as I've relocated the official website there to align with the project's new name (Libervia versus formerly Salut à Toi). As mentioned above, I have plans for a new instance, but it will likely be invite-only initially. I'm also considering a local-only demo for a quick overview of the web frontend—a non-federated feature that self-resets every few hours. We'll see if I can make the time to set it up.

Talks

I'll be delivering two talks next month in Paris:

• A 20-minute presentation in English at OW2: Catch me on stage at 15:00 on Thursday, June 15
• A 60-minute talk in French at Pas Sage En Seine: I'll be at "Salle cinéma" at 17:30 on Friday, June 16.

I would be delighted to engage in a conversation if you happen to be there.

Other

In addition to these projects, I've been focusing on parallel tasks like code refactoring, work on calendar events, and the web frontend. However, I'll delve into these topics in more detail at a later date.

That's all for this note.

Hello, it's time for a long overdue progress note.

I'll talk here about the work made on ActivityPub (AP) gateway and on end-to-end encryption around pubsub.

Oh, and if everything goes well, this blog post should be accessible from XMPP and ActivityPub (and HTTP and ATOM feed), using the same identifier goffi@goffi.org.

Forewords

The work made on the AP gateway has been possible thanks to a NLnet/NGI0 grant (with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme).

I especially appreciated that the team was really there to help bring the ideas to life, and not once did they get in the way: little paperwork, no unnecessary pressure, caring, contacts when help was needed, etc.

I wish there were more organizations like this one that really help develop libre projects for the common good.

So once again I want to thank them for all that.

XMPP ⬌ ActivityPub Gateway

There is probably no need to explain here what is ActivityPub, we can simply write that it is an open protocol that allows to do things that XMPP also allows doing, and that until now these 2 protocols could not communicate together. The work on the ActivityPub gateway aims to allow software implementing one of these 2 protocols to communicate as easily as possible. I firmly believe that all open protocols should be able to communicate which each other, to avoid creating more silos, proprietary software is already good enough at that.

To be useful, a gateway must use the full potential of both protocols. A simple bot transcribing messages as we see too often, using unsuitable features (such as instant messaging for blog posts), or using a very limited set of features to ensure compatibility are flaws that I have tried to avoid. Building a good gateway is a difficult and time-consuming task. If done right, the gateway should be as invisible as possible to the end user.

XMPP is featuring blogging since long before AP, however the set of features is not exactly the same. Current use of AP is clearly inspired from commercial "social" networks, and metadata such as subscribers/subscribed nodes (or followers/following in AP terms) are highlighted, feature such as like/favourite were missing in XMPP, and some implementation such as Pleroma do implement reactions. To integrate that in the gateway, I've been working on new specifications:

• Pubsub Public Subscriptions: a way to publicly announce subscriptions, in an opt-in way. With this it's possible to implement followers/following features in a way respectful of privacy.

• Pubsub Attachments: a generic way to attach any kind of data to a pubsub item. It's notably used to implements noticed/favourite button (see here and reactions.

• Calendar Events: handling of events and all the RSVP mechanism. Libervia was handling events for years, but it was an experimental implementation, this specification is a next step in the effort to make it a standard.

Note that this XEP and the others linked below have been accepted but are not yet visible in official list.

You may wonder why there is a specification for Calendar Events… It's because the AP gateway also handles them, making it compatible with Mobilizon. The gateway may evolve in the future to support other non (micro)blogging use cases.

The gateway is now finished in terms of functionalities, however the code is clearly of an alpha quality for the moment. Now the goal in the coming months will be to stabilize and possibly implement other features if there is a demand for it.

Early adopters are encouraged to try and test it as long as they keep in mind that it's not stable. So if you do try it, I recommend keeping a separate ActivityPub account in whatever stable implementation you use at the moment, this way you can check if messages or media are missing, if there is any inconsistency or other bugs, and report them to me. If you test it, please join the XMPP room libervia@chat.jabberfr.org (click here to connect from your browser) for help and feedback. Stabilization will probably take weeks, but I hope to have it done by early 2023.

Installation instructions and details on how the conversion between protocols is done is available in the documentation and notably here

A question I've been asked a lot: yes, you can use the same identifier for XMPP (JID) and AP (WebFinger actor handle) as long as you use "simple" characters (i.e. alphanumeric ASCII chars, _, . and -). If you use something more complicated, you'll have to use the escaping mechanism explained in the doc (this is due to constraints with some AP implementations).

As for blogs on pubsub nodes (what Movim calls "communities"), I made it simple: you can use directly the name of the node that holds the blog in the local part (i.e. before the "@") of your actor handle: a blog named community_bog at the XMPP pubsub service pubsub.example.org can thus be addressed with the AP actor community_blog@pubsub.example.org. This way you can use a rather user-friendly identifier to share your blog with people who are only on ActivityPub.

This gateway should work with any XMPP server, and any client that implement blogging features (Only Libervia itself and Movim implement it for now, but I have heard that other clients are planning support for it). To enjoy the whole feature set of the gateway, the new specifications need to be implemented by the clients, so you can start to fill feature requests…

With this gateway, the door is open to have a client able to talk to the ActivityPub network, while having the feature of XMPP, including e2e encrypted private messages (e2e encrypted only if you communicate with an XMPP account, not with an AP one).

Oh, and please update your graphics, drawing and other texts to include XMPP in the fediverse ;)

End-to-End Encryption

Much effort has also gone into end-to-end encryption.

OMEMO implementation has been updated (OMEMO:2 is now used), including Stanza Content Encryption which allows encrypting arbitrary elements instead of only the \<body/> of the message, I believe that Libervia is the first XMPP client to implement it. OpenPGP for XMPP (or "OX") has also been implemented, all that thanks to the work of Tim Henkes "Syndace", the author of python-omemo.

Beside instant messaging, end-to-end encryption has also been introduced to pubsub. I've made specifications for two methods:

• An OpenPGP profile for pubsub which is thought to encrypt a whole node, with a system of secret sharing/rotation/revocation. With it, it is easy to give access to new entities after publication, and to retrieve old items for newcomers. This specification can be used to encrypt any pubsub based features: (micro)blogging, calendar events, lists, etc.

• Pubsub Targeted Encryption which is a way to apply the same cryptographic system used in instant messaging to pubsub. This way, OMEMO can be used with its forward secrecy property. It is not a good option to use this specification to encrypt a whole node, as archive is then not accessible to newcomers, and to add access to a new entity you have to re-encrypt all items, but it's an interesting option to encrypt an element occasionally, for instance to restrict access of a specific post in an otherwise public blog.

Specifications have also been written to sign a pubsub item in a backward compatible way (client which don't implement those specifications can still work normally):

• Pubsub Signing

• Pubsub Signing: OpenPGP Profile

All those specifications are already implemented in Libervia, but they are only usable from CLI frontend at the moment. All you have to do is to use the --encrypt and/or --sign options from pubsub or blog commands (check documentation for details).

Uploaded files were already encrypted with OMEMO Media Sharing which is what is commonly used these days, but this method has not been accepted as a standard as it was a workaround for limitation of legacy OMEMO implementation. The proper way is now specified with Stateless File Sharing and is encrypted with Encryption For Stateless File Sharing. Those methods are currently only usable when OMEMO:2 is implemented in the peer client, and with them metadata on the shared file can be attached, including thumbnails.

Encryption has also been implemented for Jingle (XEP-0391 and XEP-0396), which is notably used for Jingle File Transfer (specially useful for large files transfers).

So to summarize, nearly everything (instant messaging, files uploaded, large file transfers, all pubsub related features) can now be e2e encrypted with Libervia.

Possible Future

With the AP gateway permitting to reach the whole AP network, all the new features implemented, and the work done on e2e encryption, Libervia has everything to be a solid option for communication. After the recent events regarding a famous commercial network, we see a breakthrough of ActivityPub that will hopefully last over time. We can now access AP from XMPP, while having the possibility to have e2e encrypted private conversations or even blogs or calendar events.

As far as I know this is, so far, something unique for a Libre decentralized software. However, there is still work to do on stabilization on UI/UX update before this is really usable.

Those feature were planned for very long (years), but the lack of resources made them slow to come. The grant has made it possible to greatly accelerate the pace of development, and I doubt that it would have been possible to have all that without it.

Regarding how large the project is, and my family life, it's not possible any more to develop seriously this project on my free time alone (and I would like to do other things, sometimes, of my free time).

In other words, I need to find a way to sustain the development of Libervia for the years to come, so I can work full-time on it, and with some luck, build a team. I'm thinking very seriously about it these days, I'll probably write on this topic in a little while. If you are willing to help in any way, please contact me (on the Libervia room linked above for instance).

That's all for this progress note. I'm now working on stabilization and UI/UX update on the web frontend.

Je suis fier d'annoncer la sortie de Libervia 0.8 « La Cecília » (anciennement nommé « Salut à Toi »), après plus de 2 ans de développement.

Cette version est une avancée majeure pour préparer le futur du projet. Voyons les principales nouveautés.

Changement de nom

Par soucis de simplicité, le projet a été renommé en « Libervia » (qui était auparavant le nom du frontal web), et tous les frontaux officiels ont maintenant un nom évident comme Libervia Web , Libervia Desktop / Mobile (c'est le même frontal dans les 2 cas), Libervia CLI pour Command-Line Interface (interface en ligne de commande), et Libervia TUI pour Terminal User Interface (interface utilisateur pour terminaux). Le backend (service d'arrière-plan) devient, comme vous pouvez le deviner, Libervia Backend. Les anciens noms sont toujours utilisés comme alias.

En plus de la volonté de simplification, le changement de nom a été fait pour s'adapter à un public international : certaines personnes pensaient que « Salut à Toi » était réservé à des personnes francophones uniquement. Espérons que ce sera plus simple pour tout le monde, et que les gens ne seront plus perdus avec tous les noms qui étaient utilisés auparavant.

Notez que le changement de nom influence aussi votre fichier de configuration qui s'appelle désormais libervia.conf (sat.conf fonctionne toujours pour le moment). Les sections y ont été mises à jour avec de nouveau noms (pour configurer l'interface en ligne de commande, vous devez maintenant utiliser la section [cli] au lieu de [jp], pour l'interface web, c'est à présent [web] au lieu de [libervia]). Veuillez vérifier la documentation si nécessaire.

Changements techniques

Libervia a été porté en Python 3, ce qui a ouvert la porte à d'autres changements.

Brython a été intégré à Libervia Web, pour remplacer "Pyjamas" (un port en Python de GWT), qui n'était plus maintenu.

Nunjucks est aussi désormais intégré à Libervia Web, ce qui permet l'utilisation commune de certains modèles avec Jinja. C'est particulièrement utile pour faire des pages qui fonctionnent avec ou sans JavaScript.

L'implémentation d'OMEMO a été complétée avec le chiffrement des salons de discussion (MUC) et des fichiers (via XEP-0454: OMEMO Media Sharing).

De nombreuses autres modifications ne sont pas expliquées dans cette note pour éviter de la rendre indigeste. Vous pouvez vous référer à la liste des changements (en anglais) pour plus d'informations.

Nouveau thème par défaut pour Libervia Web

Un nouveau thème basé sur le très bon cadriciel CSS Bulma est devenu le thème par défaut. Grâce à lui, l'interface est plus claire et agréable à utiliser.

Invitations

Un système d'invitation simple a été intégré au frontal web, et il peut être utilisé soit pour donner accès à quelque chose à quelqu'un ayant déjà un compte XMPP, soit pour inviter quelqu'un par courriel. Le but est d'être capable de partager des choses (comme un album photo ou un événement) avec famille et amis sans s'attendre à ce qu'ils ou elles installent un logiciel ou créent un compte quelconque.

Listes

Un gestionnaire de tickets décentralisé est implémenté depuis la verison 0.7, et il est notamment utilisé pour gérer les tickets de Libervia lui-même. Jusqu'ici, il fonctionnait grâce à une fonctionnalité non standard disponible uniquement sur Libervia Pubsub (anciennement « SàT Pubsub », un composant Pubsub/PEP indépendant du serveur développé en parallèle de Libervia).

Cette fonctionnalité a été renommée avec le terme plus générique « listes » et utilise désormais XEP-0346: Form Discovery and Publishing, ce qui la rend utilisable avec un service pubsub générique.

Toutes sortes de listes peuvent être créées, que ce soit des tickets pour suivre les rapports de bogues ou demandes de fonctionnalités pour un projet, des listes de tâches à faire, de course, etc. Grâce à l'utilisation de XMPP pubsub, ces listes peuvent être fédérées, et les permissions peuvent être gérées facilement (pour, par exemple, permettre aux membres de la famille de modifier une liste de courses).

Actuellement, 3 types de listes sont disponibles (tickets génériques, tâches, courses), mais on peut s'attendre à en voir plus dans les futures versions.

Albums photo

Des nombreuses améliorations ont été faites pour les albums photo du frontal web. Ils peuvent désormais être créés ou supprimés depuis Libervia Web, des photos ou des vidéos peuvent être téléversées, un diaporama utilisable avec un écran tactile et/ou sur petits écrans est disponible, ogv.js a été intégré pour rendre possible le visionnage de vidéos en Ogg Vorbis/Opus/Theora ans WebM VP8/VP9/AV1 sur les plateformes qui ne le supportent pas nativement et le système d'invitations mentionné plus haut a été intégré.

Bureau

L'interface utilisateur de Libervia Desktop a également été mise à jour : la barre de menu supérieure a été supprimée, le glisser/déposer de fichiers est maintenant possible suivant la plateforme, la messagerie instantanée a un défilement infini, un nouvel écran de « sélection de conversation » rend le choix d'une entité avec qui discuter ou d'un salon à joindre plus faciles, les pièces jointes des messages sont affichées de manière plus agréable, entre autres améliorations.

Du travail a aussi été effectué sur Libervia Mobile (qui ne fonctionne que sur Android pour le moment), mais ce frontend n'est pas encore assez stable pour les utilisateurs finaux.

Ligne de commande

L'interface en ligne de commande est à présent entièrement documentée (en anglais) et suite au changement de nom peut être utilisé soit avec la commande libervia-cli, soit la version courte li (l'ancien jp fonctionne encore pour le moment). Parmi les nouvelles commandes on peut mettre en avant li file get qui peut télécharger un fichier avec la gestion du schéma aesgcm (c.-à-d. « OMEMO Media Sharing », le partage de média via OMEMO), qui en fait une sorte de wget avec OMEMO. li file upload gère aussi le chiffrement de bout en bout, il est ainsi facile de partager un fichier chiffré depuis la ligne de commande ou un script.

La couleur d'arrière-plan est maintenant automatiquement détectée sur les émulateurs de terminaux compatibles et le thème est choisi en conséquence.

Mais aussi…

Composant de partage de fichiers

Libervia peut s'utiliser comme un composant (ce qui peut être vu comme un plugin générique pour serveur XMPP), et il inclut un composant de partage de fichiers.

Ce composant stocke les fichiers qui peuvent être retrouvés soit selon les permissions accordées, soit publiquement.

Les fichiers peuvent être téléversés ou téléchargés via XEP-0234: Jingle File Transfer et XEP-0363: HTTP File Upload est maintenant aussi implémenté, ce qui rend possible de partager des fichiers avec des liens HTTPS.

Ce composant peut maintenant être utilisé pour remplacer les implémentations internes aux serveurs XMPP de « HTTP File Upload ». En plus de la gestion des permissions fines, il n'y a pas de taille limite pour les fichiers et des quotas par utilisateurs peuvent être mis en place. Veuillez vous référer à la documentation pour voir comment faire. Les fichiers téléversés peuvent être retrouvés en utilisant XEP-0329: File Information Sharing et supprimés grâce aux commandes Ad-Hoc (XEP-0050: Ad-Hoc Commands).

Ce composant est nécessaire pour utiliser la fonctionnalité d'album photos.

Libervia Pubsub

Un composant Pubsub/PEP (anciennement appelé « SàT Pubsub ») est développé en parallèle de Libervia. Il vise à fournir une implémentation complète et indépendante du serveur.

Libervia Pubsub est publié en même temps que le client XMPP Libervia, et a, lui aussi, été porté sur Python 3.

Parmi les nouveautés, la recherche en texte plein a été implémentée (XEP-0431: Full Text Search in MAM), ainsi que la XEP-0346: Form Discovery and Publishing qui remplace les schémas de nœud (qui étaient non standard), et PEP fonctionne à présent pour le serveur lui-même, ce qui le rend utilisable pour la XEP-0455: Service Outage Status.

Images Docker

Les images Docker on été mises à jour et déplacées directement dans le dépôt libervia-backend (dans le sous-dossier docker).

Site officiel

Le site officiel a été mis à jour avec un nouveau thème (basé sur le nouveau thème de Libervia Web).

Installation

Libervia est disponible sur plusieurs distributions NU/Linux (au moins Debian et dérivées et Arch Linux). Malheureusement, la version actuellement dans Debian n'est pas à jour (à cause d'une publication à des dates différentes de Debian et Libervia), espérons que la nouvelle version sera disponible dans un dépôt « backport » rapidement.

Vous pouvez facilement installer Libervia sur n'importe quelle distribution en utilisant pipx:

$ pipx install libervia-backend
$ pipx install libervia-desktop

Ensuite lancez libervia-backend et un frontal (comme libervia-cli ou libervia-desktop). Reportez-vous à la documentation pour plus de détails.

Des images Docker sont disponibles, et en particulier un fichier web-demo.yml peut être utilisé avec docker-compose pour rapidement mettre en place une démo locale :

$ hg clone https://repos.goffi.org/libervia-backend 
$ cd libervia-backend/docker
$ docker-compose -f web-demo.yml up

Ensuite ouvrez votre butineur sur http://localhost:8880 et utilisez l'identifiant demo avec le mot de passe demo.

Et après ?

Un projet basé sur Libervia a été sélectionné par NLnet pour une subvention. Ce projet est en 2 parties : travailler sur une passerelle XMPP ⟺ ActivityPub, puis sur le chiffrement de bout en bout pour pubsub et les fichiers. Vous trouverez plus d'informations (en anglais) sur ce billet de blog et sur la page du projet NLnet. Ce projet est déjà bien entamé, et vous pouvez suivre la progression sur mon blog (qui est propulsé par Libervia/XMPP) ou sur le système de gestion de tickets (lui aussi propulsé par Libervia/XMPP). Un énorme merci à NLnet/NGI0 Discovery Fund !

D'autre part, il est prévu de travailler pour améliorer l'expérience utilisateur et la fonctionnalité de messagerie instantanée (en particulier sur le frontal web). Libervia vise à être particulièrement adapté pour les réseaux privés destinés à la famille et aux amis.

Enfin, j'ai eu la bonne surprise de voir que Libervia Web est utilisé pour le blog de jmp.chat. JMP est une entreprise qui vous fourni un numéro de téléphone qui peut être utilisé avec XMPP et SIP (vous pouvez appeler ce numéro depuis un téléphone traditionnel et recevoir l'appel vocal depuis un client XMPP)

Voilà qui conclu cette note de version. À bientôt !

I'm proud to announce the release of Libervia 0.8 « La Cecília » (formerly known as « Salut à Toi »), after more than 2 years of development.

This version is a big milestone preparing the future of the project. Let's have an overview of some major changes.

Project Renaming

In the interest of simplicity, the project has been renamed to " Libervia " (with was formerly the name of the web frontend), and all official frontends have now a straightforward name such as Libervia Web , Libervia Desktop / Mobile (same frontend for both), Libervia CLI for Command-Line Interface , and Libervia TUI for Terminal User Interface. The backend is, as you can guess, Libervia Backend. The former names are for now still used as aliases.

Beside simplicity, the name change was also due to concerns with international audience: some people were thinking that "Salut à Toi" was dedicated to French-speaking people only. Hopefully, it will be easier for everybody, and people won't get confused any more by all the names which were previously used.

Note that the renaming has implications on your configuration file which is now named libervia.conf (sat.conf is still working for now). The sections have been updated with new names (to configure the CLI frontend you now use [cli] section instead of [jp], for the web frontend it's now [web] instead of [libervia]). Please check documentation in case of doubt.

Technical Changes

Libervia has been ported to Python 3, which has opened the door to other changes.

Brython has been integrated to Libervia Web, to replace the unmaintained "Pyjamas" (which was a Python port of GWT).

Nunjucks is also now integrated in Libervia Web, making it possible to share some templates with Jinja. This is notably useful to make some pages working with or without JavaScript.

OMEMO implementation has been completed with support for MUCs (group chats) and files (via XEP-0454: OMEMO Media Sharing).

Many other changes are not explained in this note to avoid it being indigestible, you can check the CHANGELOG for more information.

Libervia Web New Default Theme

A new theme for Libervia Web based on the nice Bulma CSS framework has been made and is now the default one. Thanks to it the interface is clearer and more pleasant to use.

Invitations

An easy to use invitation system has been implemented in Web frontend, and can be used either to give access to something to somebody with an existing XMPP account, or to invite somebody by email. The goal is to be able to share things (e.g. photo album, event) with family or friends without having to expect them to install a software or create an account.

Lists

A decentralised issue tracking system was implemented since version 0.7, which was notably used to manage Libervia's own tickets. It was using a non-standard feature available only in Libervia Pubsub (formerly "SàT Pubsub", server independent Pubsub/PEP component, a side project).

This feature has been renamed to "Lists" and now uses XEP-0346: Form Discovery and Publishing which makes it usable with a generic Pubsub service.

Any kind of list can be created, from project tickets to keep track of bug report of feature requests, to To-do list, grocery list, etc. Being based on XMPP pubsub, lists can be federated, and permissions can be managed easily (for instance to allow various family members to modify a shopping list).

For the moment 3 kinds of lists are available (generic tickets, To-Do, grocery), but more are expected to come in future versions.

Photo albums

Lots of improvements have been made on the photo albums in the web frontend. They can now be created or deleted from Libervia Web, photos or videos can be uploaded, a touch/mobile-friendly slideshow is available, ogv.js has been integrated to make possible the viewing of videos in Ogg Vorbis/Opus/Theora ans WebM VP8/VP9/AV1 on platforms not supporting them natively, and the invitation system mentioned above has been integrated.

Desktop

Libervia Desktop UI has also been updated, the top menu has been removed, file dropping is now possible on suitable platforms, chat has infinite scrolling, a new "chat selector" screen makes it easier to select entity to chat with or room to join, message attachments are show in a more user-friendly way, and several other improvements has been done.

Work has also been done on Libervia Mobile (which is Android only for now), but this frontend is not user-friendly enough yet for end-user.

CLI

The CLI frontend is now fully documented and following the renaming can now be accessed either by libervia-cli or the shorter li (legacy jp is still working for now). Among new commands we can highlight li file get which retrieve a file with support of aesgcm scheme (i.e. OMEMO Media Sharing), which makes it a kind of OMEMO enabled wget like. li file upload also handle end-to-end encryption, it's thus easy to share an encrypted file from command-line or a script.

Background colour is now automatically detected on compatible terminal emulator, and theme is adapted consequently.

But Also…

File Sharing Component

Libervia can act as a component (which can be seen as generic XMPP server plugins), and it includes a File Sharing Component.

This component store files which can be retrieved either according to given permissions or publicly.

Files can be uploaded or downloaded via XEP-0234: Jingle File Transfer and XEP-0363: HTTP File Upload is now also implemented, making it possible to share files via HTTPS link.

This component can now be used to replace internal XMPP servers HTTP File Upload implementations. In addition to the fine permission management, it does not have a size limit and user quotas can be set, check the documentation to see how to set them. Files uploaded can be retrieved using XEP-0329: File Information Sharing and deleted with XEP-0050: Ad-Hoc Commands.

This component is necessary to use the Photo Album feature.

Libervia Pubsub

A Pubsub/PEP component (formerly named "SàT Pubsub") is developed next to Libervia. It aims to provide a server independent feature-full implementation.

Libervia Pubsub is released at the same time as the Libervia XMPP client, and has also been ported to Python 3.

Among novelties, Full-Text Search has been implemented (XEP-0431: Full Text Search in MAM), as well as XEP-0346: Form Discovery and Publishing which replaces the former non-standard node schema, and PEP is now working for the server itself, making it usable for XEP-0455: Service Outage Status.

Docker Images

Docker images have been updated and moved directly to libervia-backend repository (in docker subdirectory).

Official Website

The Official Website has been updated with a new theme (based on Libervia Web new theme).

Installation

Libervia is available on several GNU/Linux distributions (at least Debian and derivative and Arch Linux). Unfortunately, the current Debian version is outdated (due to incompatible Debian and Libervia release dates), hopefully the new version will be available as a backport soon.

You can easily install Libervia on any distribution by using pipx:

$ pipx install libervia-backend
$ pipx install libervia-desktop

Then launch libervia-backend, and a frontend (e.g. libervia-cli or libervia-desktop). Check the documentation for details.

Docker images are available, and notably a web-demo.yml file can be used with docker-compose to quickly try a local demo:

$ hg clone https://repos.goffi.org/libervia-backend 
$ cd libervia-backend/docker
$ docker-compose -f web-demo.yml up

Then open your browser on http://localhost:8880 and use the login demo with password demo.

What's Next

A Libervia based project has been selected by NLnet for a grant. This project is in 2 parts: working on an XMPP ⟺ ActivityPub gateway, then on pubsub and files end-to-end encryption. You'll find more information on this blog post and on NLnet project page. The project has already well started, and you can follow the progress on my blog (which is Libervia/XMPP powered) or on the ticket tracker (which is also Libervia/XMPP powered). A huge thanks to NLnet/NGI0 Discovery Fund!

Besides, work is planned to improve user experience and instant messaging feature (notably on Web frontend). Libervia aims to be a good fit for private networks for family and friends.

Last but not least, I've been pleased to see that Libervia Web is used to power jmp.chat blog. JMP is a company which give you a real phone number which can be used with XMPP and SIP (you can call this number from a traditional phone and get the voice call from a XMPP client).

This concludes this release post. Stay tuned!