XMPP Account Portability¶
The XMPP Account Portability project is standardizing a way to migrate a user’s account data from one XMPP-based service provider or software to another. The project will develop and publish a suitable protocol and data format via the XMPP Standards Foundation’s standards process, as well as a reference implementation. Finally, the work will be integrated into Snikket, a suite of XMPP-based open-source communication software.
This project was officially completed in January 2022. The results of the project are all open-source and publicly available, now living on in their various places:
- Standards: XEP-0227: Portable Import/Export Format for XMPP-IM Servers, XEP-0283: Moved
- Snikket: The January 2022 Snikket server release added account import and export functionality.
- Prosody: The work resulted in creating/updating several modules: mod_storage_xep0227, mod_http_xep227, mod_auto_moved.
- Web-based account migrator: https://migrate.modernxmpp.org/ (source)
A detailed report of the project results, as submitted to DAPSI (who funded the project), is available as a PDF: XPORTA Project Final Evaluation.pdf (75KB)
Timeline
- April 2021: Read the project announcement on the Snikket blog!
- May 2021: Research and document drafting.
- June 2021: XEP-0227 revision 1.1 has been submitted to the XSF. A new proto-XEP "Moved 2.0" has also been submitted. Both submissions are awaiting approval from the XSF technical council.
- July 2021: A beta web-based XMPP account migrator is now online!
- August 2021: Initial implementation in Prosody, as mod_storage_xep0227 and mod_auto_moved.
- September 2021: Implementation work continues, meanwhile the XSF approved and published the updated version (1.1) of XEP-0227. Also ejabberd, another popular server implementation, gains support for the new XEP-0227 features.
- October 2021: The project is evaluated by the DAPSI team, and approved to continue to the second phase! Work on implementation and testing in Prosody continues.
- Nov/Dec 2021: Implementation in Snikket begins, including a friendly user interface to download and import account data.
- January 2022: Finish implementation and submit documentation for final evaluation by DAPSI.
Credits
This project has received funding from the European Union's H2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement no 871498
