Firstly: Yes, I like Synapse / Cinny / Element too...don't hate me...but needs must when the devil drives...
For reasons that are too complex to get into (TL;DR: hodge podge of equipment from the dawn of time, from intransigent family members, complexity over HTTP vs HTTPS...they usual nonsense when you volunteer to become the family sysadmin) I've been looking at different methods for a persistent, family chat experience that I can "self host".
Does anyone know much about Jami?
From what I can see, it has the following worthwhile features:
- FOSS/GPL
- Android, Windows, Linux, macOS and iOS.
- Text messaging ,group chats, video calls
- File sharing, E2EE etc etc
- It apparently works over a LAN with no Internet connection at all, which is particularly interesting to me.
- Federation not required.
- CA not required
- Transparent handoff with Tailscale
From what I can see, there's a headless jami-daemon for Linux. Jami's own docs specifically suggest putting an existing account on an always-online server to facilitate message exchange, with multiple servers possible for redundancy.
So...that's...good.
OTOH, there isn't a Synapse-equivalent central Jami server holding everyone's accounts and rooms. Accounts and conversations are distributed across the participating devices, though as I said above, it looks like Jami does support an always-online daemon/device to improve message availability.
I dunno what to make of it. It seems...too good to be true.
Has anyone use it? Particularly, is the always-online jami-daemon actually dependable for store-and-forward behavior in practice?
https://github.com/savoirfairelinux
EDIT: This was an interesting experiment, but Jami is far too unreliable even without UnifiedPush / DHT (which I think is the main issue). I presented the work done so far and the consensus is to look at using IRC (as most of the users are familiar with that) and having Janus as the video chat / WebRTC server. It seems to work on all of their devices and doesn't have any of the cute issues we encountered with Synapse / Matrix
TL;DR the fam has settled on -
- Ergo as IRC server: https://ergo.chat/
- The Lounge as PWA IRC client: https://thelounge.chat/
- Janus for video calls: https://janus.conf.meetecho.com/index.html
- I will host all this on the Pi at my place and they can tailscale in.
I'm tied, boss. Never volunteer.
It sounds good but in practice it doesn't work out; laptops sleep, people put their phones on airplane at night, whatever happens in life. The "best" solutions use some sort of cache-and-forward relay (thinking like DeltaChat relays, or I hear SimpleX is adding them) but I think most end up looking at Snikket (xmpp) or Matrix for the group management etc. on a central server. The Disroot group uses "Movim" which is XMPP highly customized to a social experience.
I use DeltaChat with friends and there's a lot of things you can't do because it's essentially P2P with caching relays - like Jami, all control and data is stored on the device(s). If all you're looking for is a Signal replacement it's great (and why we use it), but if you want good group social controls you gotta go the central server route.
I think Jami here could do with caching relays like Delta has, could move this project to the next level.
I think they have that now, thus my interest
https://docs.jami.net/en_US/user/jami-for-servers.html