A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Jitsi Meet can be self-hosted. The data will go through your server, but end-to-end encryption can be used.
Another option is Wirow. Again, data goes through the servers.
I do not think if there are any peer-to-peer video chat applications. If there were, why would there be a need for self-hosting a server?
Jitsi Meet it's usually p2p for calls between two persons. As soon as a third person joins, the meeting gets routed through the server. You can see this by a slight delay happening when person 3 joins. It won't happen again for every additional person joining
I do not think if there are any peer-to-peer video chat applications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_%28protocol%29
Also when you use Jingles on XMPP, usually the voice and video part is P2P. Negociation goes through the federated xmpp servers of the respective users.
The self hosted part would be for discovery.
How many participants in your video call?
If it's 1 on 1, you want direct connections.
If it's a conference of 30 people, you don't want direct connections, because everybody's typical plastic home wifi router is very unable to handle 30 incoming plus 30 outgoing video streams at once.
It would be 2 or 3 people max.
Usually it's p2p, there's a moment while initiating the connection where some server is needed for STUN/TURN (i.e. NAT traversal).
I assume some service may have a fallback for server broadcast instead of p2p, but none that I know of do such a thing.
Thanks. I’m just curious how much bandwidth would be consumed by the self hosted server if all video traffic is routed through it. If the video traffic is p2p then the self hosted server would be cheaper to maintain.
Of course check the implementation you end up using if it truly is p2p. Also you can analyze the bandwidth of services on your server, which may be useful in your case.
Of course it depends on what software you are using.
Though as a rule of thumb, peers try to connect directly. That's not always possible due to firewalls/NATs, so often TURN servers are used as intermediary.
Self hosted only fans? I want to put on shows for myself to help me save money easier.
I need to stop shit posting in genuine communities.
It depends on the video chat service you want to install.
That depends entirely on the protocol you're using... That's like asking if HTTP works the same way as vittorrent because they both are used to transfer files.
If if you already run a nextcloud server you should use nextcloud talk. It has web and mobile apps.
@YurkshireLad Depends on the video chat service and on the infrastructure of the participants.
Most browser based video chat services use WebRTC which usually uses peer to peer if NAT hole punching works - but that depends on the ISP routers.
This article explains it pretty well: https://blog.nirbheek.in/2023/07/webrtc-signalling.html?m=1
Services that may be easier to selfhost than Jitsi:
https://github.com/miroslavpejic85/mirotalk
https://galene.org/