Ever looked up XMPP ?
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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And Snikket for super-easy setup and management
Way too few mentions of Jitsi.
I use it with friends, it has good server config, and I'm pushing it on businesses.
they are owned by a Nasdaq-listed company. does that not the defeat the purpose when OP is trying to avoid Wall Street-ownership?
Discord is a completely proprietary walled-garden that bans third-party clients to maintain full control AND (soon) has Wall-Street-ownership.
Jitsi is open-source built with multiple open protocols BUT has Wall-Street-ownership.
Neither is great, but these are two distinctly different situations.
Just self-host it? It's open-source, that will last you a lifetime.
Explain more of this Jitsi, sounds interesting for my business
It's voice and video calling with chat and screensharing. I intend to use it for a language school. It's extendable, for instance you can also self-host a whiteboard, where everyone can draw. You can see the drawing in real time, which is good for asian languages, where direction of the stroke is important.
Free, open-source, packaged in Debian, runs without issues, used it with friends for multi-hour voice chats during gaming nights.
On the server you can configure things like FPS for screenshare. I have yet to adjust that and try streaming video/game through it.
This does sound extremely useful and good.
I'd say the only issues software like this have is there's a lack of beginners guides to self hosting, so people either know too little and instantly have their server botted / hacked, or know enough to be too paranoid and afraid to set up their own server because they know of the risks.
As for me though, I'll probably look into implementing this and play around with it for our DnD group first.
That sounds great, let me know how it works for you.
There is also BigBlueButton if you are looking for another similar project.
mumble is great for VOIP.
Matrix seems interesting, but i think it might be a little bit too heavy handed, im not personally a fan of web tech, though there are other things like xmpp as well.
revolt is meh, apparently their dev team is hostile to self hosting, so there's that. There's also spacebar, which is a reverse engineered implementation of the discord API, could be interesting.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by web tech? I don't know much about how matrix works
a lot of modern technology and software is built on the foundation of work built by the web browser industry, it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not necessarily a good thing either. Provides a lot of nice features, native integration into a web browser, industry standard security and encryption procedures.
That's about it though, Outside of that, running a dedicated version of that app is almost always some bullshit built in electron, which is a horrible buggy mess with horrible performance. Nothing stops devs from integrating these features into a standalone application... But, they likely won't since they've already developed a web browser version.
I also have some problems with the way web tech is generally built, it's built with the expectation that you will host and treat it as a web app, which is fine, it works. But i prefer not to host services i use via anything web related as generally i find it both intrusive, and problematic, in the instance that a DNS server goes down for example. (it's not very likely, i know, but still)
I also think a lot of the networking protocols are fairly bloated, but that's not as big of a deal, it's just annoying.
anyway, enough of my ranting. Matrix is actually a specification for a set of communication protocols based on the foundation of web tech, it's highly universal, and inter-compatible, which is great. But it sort of stops there. There are several server implementations, and numerous front end implementations, none of which seem to be particularly, interesting. There's numerous electron front ends, a few that aren't (though they won't support most features) etc, stuff like that, it's just. Not clean.
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