- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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?
Quick question after you found happiness using IRC: was xmpp not enough ? I’m genuinely curious in case I need something like this
XMPP is not good. The clients are poor. The core server requires a bunch of extensions to do basic stuff like sync history with clients. I have my gripes with Matrix but I ran right back to it after trying xmpp for a month. Yes I tried the distros etc etc, the stack is too old and people aren’t modernizing it.
I don’t understand why people keep bringing it up as if it is a viable modern replacement for Matrix, it isn’t.
It wasn’t interoperable enough with the wide cornucopia of devices in the group. We’re talking Mac, pc, android 6 thru to 15 and a few more besides.
It wasn’t that XMPP was incapable, it’s that the client matrix was too uneven across the wide range of devices I needed to support.
IRC was simpler, lighter, easier to diagnose, and had clients for basically everything. Plus most of us were familiar with IRC from back in the day.
I also already had Janus for video chat set up, plus Tailscale already hooked into the pi, so most of XMPP’s extra machinery solved problems I no longer had.
TL; DR easier to host on pi, easier for client devices, less moving parts.
Personally, I just really like the look and feel of motd