June 13 2024, Asia Meetup

The Asia Regional Meetups are bimonthly text-based gatherings that bring together folks from the Asian region to share, connect, seek help, and release stress by celebrating each other. In addition, it is a time for us to find ways to support each other, and help us understand what is happening in our part of the world. If you cannot attend the monthly meetups, we are taking notes of each gathering and linking to them below.

The Asian community is connected during the week in different ways. Either through the Asian channel on the TCU Mattermost or via different events organized on various topics during the year.

Date: Thursday, June 13 2024

Time: 5:30pm IST/ 6:30pm MMT / 8am EDT / 12pm UTC (What time is it in my city?)

Who: Facilitated by Sapni

Where: Text-based format in the Regional Asia channel on the TCU Mattermost.

• Don't have an account to the IFF Mattermost? you can request one following the directions here.

Notes

Asia Meetups What are the Asia Meetups Others Villages & Special Events Upcoming Meetups & Gatherings

Pranav is a freelancer from India, working to advance Privacy and Security in the digital age. They volunteer at https://prav.app/.

Tell us about Prav and your work at Prav.

Prav is an open source messaging app that runs on open protocol XMPP. I wear many hats, like handling technical issues on server, website , or give my time to spread word about Prav. In fact, we are a co-operative and most members here wear many hats.

What was the motivation behind these choices? Both on the decision to create a messaging app as well its cooperative structure.

Most messaging apps don't value the user in a way that users have complete control over their communications. Prav offers, auditable code, security, privacy, no vendor lock-in, transparent policies, and a democratic structure. Prav runs on the XMPP protocol to make the communications infra inclusive. You don't need to be on Prav if you wish to talk to people on Prav, users can roll out their own server, connect their own domain, and chat will all users on the XMPP network.

We decided to register Prav as a cooperative to establish democratic decision making. It's registered in India because that's where all the members live.

While we are at it, could you please simplify the technical aspects of Prav, as in how XMPP possibly makes it different from the Signal Protocol?

XMPP is a communications protocol. It standardizes how a client (e.g. Prav mobile app) should communicate with the server (say the Prav XMPP server) and also how XMPP servers should communicate with each other. XMPP is similar to http, smtp, etc. These protocols are standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Whereas the Signal Protocol is a cryptographic protocol that determines how end-to-end encryption is implemented. It used by Signal and some other apps.

Prav and most other XMPP clients allow the use of PGP and OMEMO to encrypt messages.

We can't compare XMPP with the Signal protocol because they serve different purposes.

So coming back to Prav, what are the speedbumps that you have observed while operating the app with the current userbase?

On the technical side, we need volunteers from time-zones other than IST, so we can resolve issues as they come in. Secondly, we are planning to roll out custom username support on our Android app and develop an app for iOS and we've raised money for it via https://opencollective.com/prav-ios.

Is this something you would like to share with the wider community, i.e volunteers? How can they volunteer or where should interested people sign up?

You can help us by

• improving our code (https://codeberg.org/prav)
• donating
• spreading awareness about Prav and it's values
• using our app and offering feedback (it's available on Android via F-droid and Play store)

There are more suggestions at https://prav.app/volunteer/