@lxo Unless the people using #Jami are pretty advanced, they won’t like it. Having to be online at the same time, difficulties trying to use the same ID on multiple devices, those are things that most people will not tolerate.
Maybe they have fixed some issues since I last tried to use it, but it was unpleasant to use during and shortly after the GNU #Ring days.
@geniusmusing @lxo This is important. #GNU #Jami used to only send when both parties were online simultaneously. If the parties in the conversation are in different timezones, that may not happen often.
Users reasonably want end-to-end encryption (E2EE), but still want some basic usability.
(The experience back in the GNU #Ring days was pretty bad. Even today, none of my contacts will reconsider it.)
Likewise, I’ve pretty much abandoned #Jami (or #Ring, if you used it previously) because all my contacts dumped it years back when an update forced everyone to re-add their contacts.
But I don't object to others choosing such end-to-end encrypted messengers over messaging apps such as (for example) #Facebook_Messenger.
I personally use #Wire, #XMPP, #Matrix, and #WickrMe. (I tried #Jami, but it wasn't very usable yet; none of my contacts were willing to try #Tox or #Briar.) I've even considered getting a Google account again so I can use whatever their latest incarnation of messaging is (just because almost everyone I know has a Google account).
It does bother me that Signal and Telegram and most other messaging services are centralized and non-federated.
It seems we haven't learned from the 1990s & early 2000s when some friends had AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), some had MSN Messenger, some had Yahoo Messenger, some had ICQ, and a few had various other walled garden messengers (such as Excite's messenger). If I wanted to talk with all my friends, I needed to have accounts on every possible service. I should be able to communicate with my friends from whatever service I choose to use to whatever services they choose to use and not have to create accounts on every possible service.
But that's a matter of educating our friends and family, not of dogmatically refusing to communicate with them on any service they might use.
@hambibleibt the biggest problem with #Tox from a #UX POV is the fragmentation across OS platforms. Apps for some OS have group chat, while others don't. Anyone could develop an app compatible with the protocol set #Jami uses, but the dev team has an app for each major OS, and features roll out across all of them at the same time. Jami also seems to progress steadily, while Tox dev seems to have been in hibernation for some time.
I've been testing #Jami again after a number of software updates. Text chat performance has improved markedly. It's delivering each message quickly, and in order. Users can now send both voice messages and video messages, which is great for doing voice/ video chat on patchy network connection. Now I'm excited for the group text chat feature to ship!
Have you looked at #BigBlueButton and the #Greenlight front end? If you don't want the hassle of running a server, #Jami is pretty good for voice calls, probably video too. Ironically their text chat is the bit that needs work. @leah@sqozz
@rek2 you left out #Jami, which has a much more consistent #UX across platforms than #Tox (eg none of the Tox mobile apps I've tried support group chat). You also left out #BigBlueButton, which I keep hearing is much less of a resource hog on the server-side than #JitsiMeet, and I can confirm JM is a massive resource hog on the client-side. I haven't used #Discord but I've heard #Riot (#Matrix client) is a pretty good substitute?
Experience with #Jami's ancestor #Ring tells me that it needs a fairly technical user who is willing to tolerate some annoying deficiencies. My contacts have all dropped it, including one son who is a network engineer.
Be careful about promoting it to people who are not willing to endure those things, or we can chase people away from all non-Facebook communications software.
I wonder if people are aware of GNU Jami, a P2P solution. https://jami.net/
Jami has end-to-end encryption while Jitsi is only encrypted during transit. The Jitsi server has your packets available in unencrypted form. If you can't trust a Jitsi server and need end-to-end encryption, Jami can be a good alternative.
@mark certainly can be done. After all the #Session folks forked the #Signal apps and rebuilt them to run on the #Loki#blockchain. I'd love to see someone do the same using #Matrix instead of Loki. Not sure how they'd do the voice/video chat, maybe using #Jami protocols? Session doesn't have realtime voice/video anyway.
@ajeremias My understanding is that Hubzilla is more like a federated CMS (eg Wordpress or Drupal) than a social media tool. SSB, unlike the fediverse apps, is totally distributed (P2P). Like #Briar or #Jami. @liaizon