Hello! This is my first message here, I've been introduced here by a fellow member of fsfe.org, Massimo Barbieri (thank you!). A couple of years ago I started Kontalk[1], what I thought it could be a community-driven instant messaging network. For all this time, I remained "in the dark", developing this solo project and distributing it only to people I know. After moving to Google Code[2] a month ago, registrations started rising quickly (also due to the Reddit[3] effect), people started donating and showing interest to the project. Now I'm here to introduce it to the fsf, I hope it will gain more interest. In fact we need help and developers :-)
As I stated before, Kontalk is a community-driven instant messaging network, built on XMPP (100% compatible - e.g. works with Pidgin, we added a few extensions in order to make it more suitable for mobile phones, domain federation and a couple of other things). We aim to create a network of server nodes run by the community (that is, cheap servers) using XMPP on the same domain (e.g. kontalk.net), based on mobile phone number identification. Primary concerns are democracy and security: client-side encryption, phone numbers not going around the network, a "vote system" based on asymmetric encryption signing, etc... a network running and managing by itself. Although these are all a bunch of nice words :P we do have a service running on our own server. But it's the first release of Kontalk server[4], using a proprietary protocol (source code is available of course), then I decided to switch to XMPP, but both server and clients are still under heavy development. We think we could make the "big switch" at the end of this summer. XMPP development is going fast, we have 2 working servers (still with a few bugs of course) I and a few other people are testing (you're welcome to download the very unstable alpha XMPP client from Google Code).
Kontalk[5] is still far from being a full WhatsApp replacement: it still lacks many features and it needs help[6], contributions and ideas from the community.
That's it, I guess. Of course this is just an introduction, and remember this is still an embrional solo project, so please be kind :-)
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kontalk [2] http://code.google.com/p/kontalk/ [3] http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1aqekt/an_open_source_decentralised... [4] http://code.google.com/p/kontalk/source/browse?repo=pyserver [5] http://www.kontalk.org/ [6] http://www.kontalk.net/
-- Daniele