Posted on July 15, 2025
Tags: madeof:bits, topic:xmpp, topic:debian
This is an approximation of what I told at my talk Federated instant messaging, 100% debianizedat DebConf 25, for people who prefer reading text. There will also be a video recording, as soon as it’s ready :) at the link above.

Communicating is a basic human need, and today some kind of computer-mediated communication is a requirement for most people, especially those in this room.

With everything that is happening, it’s now more important than ever that these means of communication aren’t controlled by entities that can’t be trusted, whether because they can stop providing the service at any given time or worse because they are going to abuse it in order to extract more profit.

If only there was a well established chat system based on some standard developed in an open way, with all of the features one expects from a chat system but federated so that one can choose between many different and independent providers, or even self-hosting.

But wait, it does exist!

I’m not talking about IRC, I’m talking about XMPP!

While it has been around since the last millennium, it has not remained still, with hundred of XMPP Extension Protocols, or XEPs that have been developed to add all of the features that nobody in 1999 imagined we could need in Instant Messaging today, and more, such as IoT devices or even social networks.

There is a myth that this makes XMPP a mess of incompatible software, but there is an XEP for that: XEP-0479: XMPP Compliance Suites 2023, which is a list of XEPs that needs to be supported by Instant Messaging servers and clients, including mobile ones, and all of the recommended ones will mostly just work.

These include conversations.im on android, dino on linux, which also works pretty nicely on linux phones, gajim for a more fully featured option that includes the kitchen sink, profanity for text interface fanatics like me, and I’ve heard that monal works decently enough on the iThings.

One thing that sets XMPP apart from other federated protocols, is that it has already gone through the phase where everybody was on one verybig server, which then cut out federation, and we’ve learned from the experience. These days there are still a few places that cater to newcomers, like account.conversations.im/, snikket.org/(which also includes tools to make it easier to host your own instance) and quicksy.im/, but most people are actually on servers of a manageable size.

My strong recommendation is for community hosting: not just self-hosting for yourself, but finding a community you feel part of and trust, and share a server with them, whether managed by volunteers from the community itself, or by a paid provider.

If you are a Debian Developer, you already have one: you can go todb.debian.org/ , select “Change rtc password” to set your own password, wait an hour or so and you’re good to go, as described at the bottom of wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianSo….

A few years ago it had remained a bit behind, but these days it’s managed by an active team, and if you’re missing some features, or just want to know what’s happening with it, you can join their BoF on Friday afternoon (and also thank them for their work).

But for most people in this room, I’d also recommend finding a friend or two who can help as a backup, and run a server for your own families or community: as a certified lazy person who doesn’t like doing sysadmin jobs, I can guarantee it’s perfectly feasible, about in the same range of difficulty as running your own web server for a static site.

The two most popular servers for this, prosody and ejabberd, are well maintained in Debian, and these days there isn’t a lot more to do than installing them, telling them your hostname, setting up a few DNS entries, and then you mostly need to keep the machine updated and very little else.

After that, it’s just applying system security updates, upgrading everything every couple years (some configuration updates may be needed, but nothing major) and maybe helping some non-technical users, if you are hosting your non-technical friends (the kind who would need support on any other platform).

Question time (including IRC questions) included which server would be recommended for very few users (I use prosody and I’m very happy with it, but I believe ejabberd works also just fine), then somebody reminded me that I had forgotten to mention chatons.org/ , which lists free, ethical and decentralized services, including xmpp ones.

I was also asked a comparison with matrix, which does cover a very similar target as XMPP, but I am quite biased against it, and I’d prefer to talk well of my favourite platform than badly of its competitor.

blog.trueelena.org/blog/2025/0…

Posted on July 4, 2025
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, FreeSoftWear

And this is the time when one realizes that she only has one white camisole left. And it’s summer, so I’m wearing a lot of white shirts, and I always wear a white camisole under a white shirt (unless I’m wearing a full chemise).

Not a problem, I have a good pattern for a well fitting camisolethat I’ve done multiple times, I don’t even need to take my measurements and draft things, I can get some white jersey from the stash and quickly make a few.

From the stash. Where I have a roll of white jersey and one of off-white jersey. It’s in the inventory. With the “position” field set to a place that no longer exists. uooops.

But I have some leftover lightweight (woven) linen fabric. Surely if I cut the pattern as is with 2 cm of allowance and then sew it with just 1 cm of allowance it will work even in a woven fabric, right?

Wrong.

I mean, it would have probably fit, but it was too tight to squeeze into, and would require adding maybe a button closure to the front. feasible, but not something I wanted.

But that’s nothing that can’t be solved with the Power of Insertion Lace, right?

One dig through the Lace Stash¹ and some frantic zig-zag sewing later, I had a tube wide enough for me to squiggle in, with lace on the sides not because it was the easiest place for me to put it, but because it was the right place for it to preserve my modesty, of course.

Encouraged by this, I added a bit of lace to the front, for the look of it, and used some more insertion lace for the straps, instead of making them out of fabric.

And, it looks like it can work. I plan to wear it tonight, so that I can find out whether there is something that chafes or anything, but from a quick test it feels reasonable.

At bust level it’s now a bit too wide, and it gapes a bit under the arms, but I don’t think that it’s going to cause significant problems, and (other than everybody on the internet) nobody is going to see it, so it’s not a big deal.

I still have some linen, but I don’t think I’m going to make another one with the same pattern: maybe I’ll try to do something with a front opening, but I’ll see later on, also after I’ve been looking for the missing jersey in a few more potential places.

As for now, the number of white camisoles I have has doubled, and this is progress enough for today.

1. with many thanks to my mother’s friend who gave me quite a bit of vintage cotton lace.↩︎

blog.trueelena.org/blog/2025/0…

You know, Confy: the Gnome-based, mobile-friendly Conferences schedule viewer

Some days ago I posted a screenshot about an experiment I was doing with #confy , which atm is on hold.
I'm still looking about the best way to draw a calendar view which can be zoomed in and out fast.

This is using Gtk.Snapshot to draw boxes and Pango.Layout to draw text.
It's still not fast enough with large conferences (mostly because I want to keep the text the same size and just change the boxes...)

Meanwhile I made some other things: some are papercuts, some are to try to have cleaner code, and some are quite big changes:

Actions get enabled/disable correctly per context

"search" action is disabled until an event is opened, and "copy" action is enabled only while a details page is shown.
Small change but prevents some errors.

Update recent list when deleting custom event from menu

Custom event in the "open" window can be removed. Now the entry is also removed from the recent events list.

Navigation sidebar has been updated

Now items does not get out of order after opening an Event with one already opened. Previously, items not needed (eg. 'Traks' where the Event has no tracks) were removed and re-added, which caused them to appear out of order.
Now the items are hidden and shown as needed, thus they do not change order anymore. Plus they are now defined in sidebar widget template. More clear and nice.

Navigation between pages has been revisited.

Originally, every talk details page opened was simply pushed on the stack. This caused some trouble as details page can link to other details pages via overlapping talks, which where pushed on the stack too. But overlapping talks are 'circular' as if Talk A overlaps with Talk B, also Talk B overlaps with Talk A, which can lead to very long stack to navigate back, e.g.:

List -> Talk A -> Talk B -> Talk C -> Talk A -> Talk C 

List -> Talk A
  user clicks on overlapping Talk B
List -> Talk B

List -> Talk A
  user clicks on overlapping Talk B
List -> Talk A -> Talk B
  user clicks on overlapping Talk C
List -> Talk A -> Talk B -> Talk C
  user clicks on overlapping Talk A
List -> Talk A

This is also relevant for the new Search page navigation.

Search can be toggled

Search action now is toggleable (is this a word?), the "search" button in the headerbar is now a togglebutton. One click opens the search, another click closes the search (as does ctrl-f).
When search is opened, the search page is pushed on the stack. Closing the search pop the page (and popping the page closes the search).

From the search page, talk details pages follow the same logic as before, but in a separate 'group'. That is, if the search page is opened from a detail page, and from the search page the same talk is clicked, we don't pop back to the already pushed page (which closes the search) but a new detail page is pushed on the stack:

List -> Talk A -> Talk B
  user clicks the "search" button
List -> Talk A -> Talk B -> Search
  user clicks talk C
List -> Talk A -> Talk B -> Search -> Talk C
  user clicks overlapping talk A
List -> Talk A -> Talk B -> Search -> Talk C -> Talk A
  user clicks the "search" button
List -> Talk A -> Talk B

( btw: the search entry still get focused when the search page pops in. I'm quite proud I managed to keep that :) )

Updated Preference dialog

The design has been moved to template, with a simple custom widget to set caches duration.
Option to clear the recent opened events list has been added.

Everything is in git if anyone want to test it, maybe on some mobile devices, maybe during one of the upcoming conferences...