this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hey everyone.

I make Peersuite, an opensource free communication platform.

It's private by default, there's no sign-in or email collection.

It's peer-to-peer, there's no server, after discovery you are connected directly to your friends my AES-GCN encrypted WebRTC channels. It forms a mesh and identifies superpeers. Because there is no server, in order to save your data between sessions, you can download your workspace into a password encrypted file. Happy to answer any questions.

FEATURES:

  • chat with images, PMs, channels, and file send
  • group audio/video calling
  • screensharing
  • kanban board
  • whiteboard for diagrams/flowchartswith PNG export
  • collaborative document editing with formatted PDF export

The best way for self hosting is docker, its on dockerhub as openconstruct/peersuite. You can also download desktop versions from the github or use on the web at https://peersuite.space/

github - https://github.com/openconstruct/Peersuite

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago (2 children)

OK, so I tested Peersuite with a friend and I have to say: wow! We have collected a bit of feedback we would like to share:

Positive: The audio, video and screenshare quality is outright amazing and much better than Discord. We had no crackling, delays or any other disturbances in any of those features. The UI is simple and functional, and everything is snappy and fast. It is also very easy to setup a workspace and to find yourself around the overall UI.

Negatives: There appears to be no option to also share audio while screensharing, which currently is a major drawback for us. There is no dedicated audio channel. As soon as someone starts an audio call, you'll hear the person no matter what. Only if you purposely join the call, will the others hear you. Opting in and out of an audio channel like in Teamspeak or Discord would be nice. When my friend started a video call, the audio input of the webcam's microphone got activated, so I heard him twice. When he turned off the video call, the webcam's microphone stayed activated. Once someone shared their screen or their webcam and turned it off later, you would still see them in the video and screenshare menu but with the picture being black. We would expect to be gone when closing the stream. There is no option to adjust the volume of an individual user. It would be nice to assign users to carts or columns on the Kanban Board. It would be nice to adjust the size of the Collaborative Whiteboard.

It might seem like we are complaining a lot, but we actually really like the experience so far, so thank you very very much!! Once you can also share audio with your screen, and once we can setup our own persistent server (and maybe be able to adjust the volume or mute a user, and have the audio room a bit more isolated from the rest), we are ready to jump ship.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Awesome! Real world testing finds things I never have! I'm going to improve a lot of things based on this, thanks for the input.

I have actually never thought of audio while screensharing, In my head it was mainly for people to watch videos and games. That's an easy fix. Opting out of audio is easy enough. Audio and Vido shouldnt happen at the same time, thats a bug. Seeing a blackscreen after sharing is also a bug. I can implement per-user volume easily enough. User assignments in kanban is already on the roadmap. Adjusting the size of the whiteboard, this one is probably not going to happen. It was a real struggle getting it working as good as it does now. It should scale to your screen for the most part. I may re-implement Zoom in/out for drawing.

It doesn't sound like complaining, this is what I need, thank you for your input!!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Thanks for your response!

Instead of Discord another friend and I used Peersuite (via browser) for over 2h to hang out. I watched him play Oblivion for around 30 min. So far everything was stable and high qualitiy. Hadn't had any issues with the audio or the stream.

But we found another bug: if multiple people are working on columns or carts on the Kanban board, as soon as someone posts it, the textbox of the others get reset and the text they were working on is gone.

And we also had another thought: would it be possible to have the option of creating multiple audio channels like in Teamspeak or Discord? When playing team games, it is nice to have individual voice channels for each team. Another point would be user rights management, so basically what a user can or cannot do (maybe with a role-based approach: create roles like admin or read-only that you can assign to individual users), as well as the ability to block and unblock users (is this even possible with P2P?).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I'm planning to implement some sort of auth system. My current thoughts are host is auto admin, and they can pass admin. The overall issue with admin features, is if someone knows the room/password combo, theres no way to keep them out. Reloading the website or app will generate another peer ID.

I'll mess with the kanban stuff some.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I appreciate your mature response to feedback - I don't personally have a strong interest in this but generally like to support open source competitors to commercial monopolies; if you have any way to donate money to you please share and I'll send a few bucks

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I have a gihub sponsor button on the repo, and I think you found it.

Thanks! I appreciate the support!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

This review honestly sold me on trying it more than I already was. Assuming it gets actively maintained, this is a great roadmap feature/bug list. Perfectly presented constructive criticism. The internet needs more of this.