Bifrost bridge: Offline messages exchange between Matrix and XMPP

XMPP is a standard widely used for instant messaging for many years. Matrix is a similar standard emerged in recent years. Matrix bifrost bridge connects these two protocols and allow users of Matrix and XMPP to talk to each other. This is a great step in avoiding fragmentation in communities while providing choice (protocol, apps or services can be different) of joining to members. But we noticed the users joining via XMPP is at a disadvantage, they lose offline messages or messages delayed due to federation delay between matrix servers. While trying to understand this issue we realized the matrix bridge don't support offline messages for XMPP users.

There is open issue on the bifrost bridge repo, but no promise from the maintainers about a timeline. Since this is Free Software, we have the freedom to improve the code and we decided to implement it. This needs some dedicated full time effort so we should raise some funds for people working on the project.

Sunday Nkwuda and Olatunji Ajayi were working with Pirate Praveen on implementing apt support plugin for yarn package manager as part of Debian's Outreachy internships programme. They agreed to work on this project as outreachy internship period was completed. 

Looking further we found out the bridge is using xmpp.js library to implement the XMPP functionality. We started a discussion with maintainers of xmpp.is and they suggested we implement it outside xmpp.js.

We talked many persons and organizations to host the crowd funding campaign as all popular platforms don't support their country, Nigeria. Finally we saw the announcement by XSF to host worldwide projects to improve XMPP and created this collective.

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