About

Having been on Fedi for some time (since 2017) and jumping across various platforms and taking some time off on occasion, I am back with an Akkoma instance. Quiescent Cafe is my comfy space; quiet and chill, a place to talk about interests and the good things in life.

Automatically included with the Akkoma sign-up is an XMPP account with Matrix gateway. See the Server Info below for more details.

Registering

Your account will need to be approved by an admin, so read the other guidelines and rules to ensure this is a suitable space before signing up.

Donations

To ensure this continues to exist, donations are soon to be open to cover the hosting and associated expenses like domain renewal and backups.

Moderators and Bus-Factor

At the moment this is just me. If it grows beyond more than several users, Moderators will chosen from the member base. If I get hit by a bus or otherwise disappear, this will keep running for approximately a month until hosting isn't paid, realisitcally more than a month as I keep the account in credit. My wife will have all the details to log in and inform local users of their options, whether that is taking over the server or migrating to another instance.

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Rules

• Don't be a dick.
• Treat others as you would have them treat you.

If I have to elaborate more than this, or boundaries are attempted to be pushed, then this is not the place for you. Anyone signing up here should be an adult, and capable of making adult decisions. If I have to make a decision, then my decision is final. This server is not a democracy.

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Server Info

Akkoma

This Akkoma instance is hosted on Linode in Australia. At the moment it is on a small VPS, but based on donation viability I am more than happy to scale it up as required.

A couple of other services are included with Akkoma registration:

XMPP

An ejabberd instance is running on the same server, and uses Akkoma to authenticate. This mean you automatically get an XMPP chat account with your Fediverse account! There is no web client associated, you will need to install an app. I recommend Gajim for Linux and Windows, and Monocles Chat or Conversations on Android. iOS seems a bit hit and miss, but have heard Monal is okay. There a plenty of other options, but I have found these the most solid.

Matrix Gateway

Part of ejabberd is a module for a matrix gateway, so I have enabled this with explicit routing. This means for you to contact a matrix user at @user:matrix.tld, you would need to add the user as user%matrix.tld@matrix.quiescent.cafe

There was an option to have implicit routing, where the matrix id will look like an xmpp address, however I found this confusing in practice and if a contact is running both matrix and xmpp it would always contact their xmpp first which may or may not be what you want. So I left it configured as per above so it is clear when you are contacting a matrix user. Note that omemo/encryption does not work through the matrix gateway.

For a matrix user to contact you, they enter your xmpp address as a matrix id, for example user@quiescent.cafe becomes @user:quiescent.cafe, and the ejabberd matrix gateway will sort it out and start the chat in your xmpp client.

This is an early release of mod_matrix_gw, if you are reliant on matrix or it being encrypted (which this is gateway is not) then I would advise using a proper matrix server instead. However it is included as an option for folks to be able to contact you.