We are happy to announce that yesterday, the Federated Communication Association (bylaws, in German) was founded in Switzerland. Marcel Waldvogel (president), Andres Obrero (treasurer), and myself (vice president) have been appointed as officers for the first period.
The overarching goals of the Association are to boost discrimination-free communication through open protocols, open-source software, services, and hardware. The Association, of course, is inviting anyone interested in supporting these goals to join and participate.
To start, the Association will focus to strengthen and simplify XMPP deployments. Further areas of activity will be explored as the Association grows enough to support them.
The JSXC ecosystem already provides many options. However, we failed to integrate zero-configuration and federation, two parts which we deem critical for the Association goals. We therefore set out to create a zero-configuration XMPP hosting service for your personal and small-business Nextcloud instances. We are glad that the Association will assume stewardship of this service, ensuring it will stay in good hands.
Please excuse our current limited web presence, as we focus on smoothing the service experience.