decent.im

8 years


I started Decent.im 8 years ago. With glee and audacity.

"Look honey, just like Skype, but on my server!"

I found no public server which synced and archived mesasges properly and I boasted about my "feat", even at the Operators chatroom.

Screenshot of domain purchase receipt

Screenshot of decent.im frontpage in early days

There was more joy down the road.

I used it all this time with my spouse, and still do. Conversations app was the key enabler for that.

I used gateways to IRC, Skype, Slack and Facebook to be widely connected but more conveniently.

My makeshift CCTV system was connected to an XMPP account for "online status" and notificaitons of detected motion.

I initially spun the server up on Ubuntu, but pretty soon I hit some annoying limitations so I switched to Gentoo. For quite a long time, the server was running the bleeding edge of a lot of the core software, with weekly unattended updates. Prosody and stuff were pulled straight from the trunk of the version control system. The flavour of audacity is a form of compensation.

This worked exceptionally well for such an arrangement, which shows that the developers are very careful and the software stack is very stable. I got into (2017) and out of (2022) the status of Gentoo Developer in the meantime, but Decent.im still runs on Gentoo Linux.

A few users have joined over time. Those asking for two accounts, for themselves and their close relative, seem to be especially persistent in using it. Give it a try the same way.

Thanks

This is a little thingy which was built and keeps living owing to the vast treasure of perfect gifts from a lot of people.

Particular thanks:

Prosody devs - MattJ, Zash and others, for support and for keeping this all evolving.

Daniel Gultsch for Conversations which made XMPP cute and "just work" on Android.

fiaxh and larma for Dino which made XMPP cute and "just work" on desktop.

Louiz for Biboumi the IRC bridge, and for him adding support for PostgreSQL storage on my request and funded by me.

Eion Robb for his Skype bridges.

pep. for organizing the XMPP Sprint where I met many XMPP developers (including some listed above) in person.

Jonas Schäfer for keeping my back with his free monitoring system.

Conrad Kostecki for maintaining XMPP server packages in Gentoo Linux.