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.
I was never able to get it to work reliably. For those mentioning XMPP, Jami uses a serverless approach with a distributed hash table instead. In principle it has better privacy but in reality it’s flaky. IDK for sure if the flakiness comes from the DHT but either way I gave up. I might try again sometime.
I’ve been hammering it hard rn and it definitely is the Unified Push / DHT proxy. The instant those are disabled, it works reliably. So I may need to revise my position.
The thing that really caught my attention is the jami daemon
https://docs.jami.net/en_US/user/jami-for-servers.html
If I’m reading that right, it’s sort of like a headless instance that can store and forward. Additionally, it doesn’t require tail-scale / head-scale to do so (as jami has its own protocol). So no nonsense with domains, reverse proxy, certificate infrastructure or public chat service.
The only issue is “it’s not self hosted”, which was part of the brief.
You can self host Jitsi and it’s nice. I haven’t done it yet though.
Good idea. Jitsi, Galene, Janus…it just depends on what runs on my Rpi.
Jitsi is good as an ad hoc communication tool, but it won’t replace a “chat / sms” tool. I took a small peek at SimpleX, and it looks quite complex. Not sure if it really is.