Yeah, the original motivation was the shutdown of the blabber.im service. It’s not the first time a service has shut down without adequate data export/migration options, so my goal was to make something server-independent to fill that gap. It lets you download your data as a file, as well as migrating to a new server.
To be clear, I’m not saying the project owner can shut anything down. Giving them first refusal just means that if someone wants a Prosody community, we first notify the Prosody developers to see if they want to lead that community. If they’re not interested and they decline, we grant ownership to the community member that requested it.
Someone created a couple of subs on Reddit for some XMPP projects I develop. I’m now in a situation where I don’t have full control over those, and therefore don’t want to promote them as official venues for the project. That leads to me not posting to or participating in them.
This kind of situation would be prevented by an “official-only” rule, or at least to give the project developers first refusal if someone wants to create a community for a specific project.
In general I lean towards being more careful about community creation, especially as we find our feet. I’m fine with tangential stuff that doesn’t have a better home, but would certainly draw the line before general topics (memes, gaming, politics) for many reasons.
I agree that not having to wade through loads of stuff to find genuine XMPP communities here would be good, and to me that’s kind of the entire promise and purpose of this instance.
You can search most XMPP chats via https://search.jabber.network/ - the XMPP Standards Foundation also hosts some chats aimed at XMPP developers and operators: https://xmpp.org/community/chat/
It does, but my understanding is that they are not bridged.