Snikket Server - September 2024 release

We hope you’ve been having a good summer (at least if you’re up here in the northern hemisphere). Today we’re back with a new release of the self-hosted Snikket server software.

This software is what’s at the core of the Snikket project - a self-hostable “personal messaging server in a box”. If you wish for something like Messenger, WhatsApp or Signal, but not using their servers, Snikket is for you. Once deployed, you can create invitation links for family, friends, colleagues… any kind of social group is the main target audience for Snikket. The invitation links walk even the least-technical people safely through downloading the Snikket app and joining your private Snikket instance.

If you’re not a self-hoster, we also have a hosted version which lets you get your own instance started in just a few clicks.

What’s new

Some highlights of what changes this release brings:

Invitations

We’ve made a number of small but important improvements to the way invitations are created and managed.

For example, people often told us that after creating a few invitation links and sending them out, they would forget who each link was created for and why. Now Snikket allows you to attach a brief custom note to invitations, visible only to admins in the list of pending invitations, making it easy to see at a glance who has yet to accept their invitation.

Example of the new invitation form, which allows adding an optional comment

Meanwhile we’ve added an important feature that was missing from invitations - you can now specify the role that will be applied to anyone who joins using a given invitation link. Previously, if you wanted to set up e.g. a child with a “limited” account, they would first join as a normal user, and then you would need to navigate to the user management page and assign them the “Limited” role. With this new release, you are able to assign the role directly when you create the invitation, which is much simpler and more secure.

Invitations now allow selecting the user’s role before they sign up

A really handy feature we’ve added is the ability to share the invitation link directly through other apps, if your web browser supports it (which most mobile browsers do). This can make it much easier to send invitation links via SMS/email or other apps in a couple of taps, without manual copy and pasting.

An example of the invitation sharing feature in Firefox on Android

Changes to blocking

Though uncommonly used on private servers, it’s nevertheless possible to block people in Snikket. When you do this, the blocked person would receive a delivery error when attempting to send a message to someone who had blocked them. From this error, it’s possible to deduce that you have been blocked.

Based on feedback, we have adjusted this so that no delivery error is sent to people you have blocked.

Technical stuff

We’ve added a few new things that are not present in the interface, but are of interest to people deploying Snikket.

It is now possible to adjust the port of the STUN/TURN server. By default this adjusts the port of the internal server that is provided with Snikket, but if you have configured an external TURN server then it means you are now able to host that on non-standard ports too.

Self-hosted instances are now able to use International Domain Names (IDNs), i.e. domain names that contain unicode characters. This feature is not yet available for instances hosted by Snikket, but let us know if you’re interested.

Other

Of course these are just the highlights. We’ve also improved a bunch of things under the hood, either in Snikket or as part of Prosody, the open-source project which powers Snikket’s chat connections, and has been updated in this new release.

For more information, and more changes in this release, check out the release notes.

Upgrading

Upgrading an existing installation is super simple and takes less than a minute! You can find instructions in the ‘Upgrading’ section of the release notes.

If you have any questions or feedback about the new release, come and join the discussion in our community chat.

We hope you enjoy Snikket. Happy chatting!