Snikket is an open-source personal messaging service that you can host yourself.

The project is built on a number of important principles:

Open source

Trust in your communication tools is important. All components of Snikket are open-source, licensed under MIT or GPL.

Snikket itself is built on top of (and wouldn't be possible without) many existing open-source projects, and contributes improvements and features to these projects whenever possible, including Prosody and Conversations.

Open standards

It is all too tempting to build shiny new software on shiny new protocols, but we believe in interoperability. This allows users freedom to choose (or even develop!) their preferred communication software, freedom to easily migrate services, and prevents the formation of yet another closed network.

Snikket uses the mature internet messaging protocol, XMPP (previously known as Jabber). XMPP is over 20 years old, but has evolved a lot in that time. We take pride in contributing to the advancement of XMPP and ensuring that a new generation of internet users have the choice of a free and open messaging protocol and network.

Self-hosted

None of this would be relevant if you couldn't take control of your own communications and run the service yourself. In fact, we encourage this! We believe in small, individually-owned services, serving small and trusted groups of people. Likewise, people should be able to choose to have their services hosted by someone that they trust.

Federated

Individual servers are great, but your small 5-person setup is of no comparison to the massive commercial networks of today. Snikket's secret is federation. Federation means that users of one Snikket service can easily communicate with users of another Snikket service.

Federation turns many small individually-owned servers from a collection of tiny silos into an extensive open global messaging network! What's more, since Snikket uses XMPP, there is already a large network of people and services that Snikket becomes a part of.

Privacy-friendly

Your users' account data is stored only on your Snikket server, and personal communication between users of your instance travels via your Snikket server only. Excluding features that strictly require internet access, Snikket will even work in closed and private network environments.

User-friendly

All the features in the world won't help people to switch if the experience is poor. Ensuring that our software is user-friendly is one of our top priorities, so that nobody is asked to choose between privacy or convenience. Our mobile apps are built to be friendly and familiar to users of other mainstream messaging apps.