Is it ok? Is there something else you recommend instead? I tried nextcloud talk and it was pretty bad. Jitsi was ok but self hosting it looked complicated. FOSS only, of course.
XMPP is absolutely the best option if you don’t care about metadata protection.
XMPP does video chat, or at least voice? What clients do you recommend? Linux, android, and iphone are all of interest. Thanks.
I found it to be inconsistent about receiving messages on Android.
Having good luck with SimpleX at the moment.
I use Jami and love it. If you want to use it on a de-googled phone you may not get live notifications though, which is annoying if you want to use it for calls. The simplest solution is to allow it to run in the background but it also allows you to use selfhosted push notifications which is cool. I just let it run an accept the hit to to my phone’s battery. Jami is fairly easy to use and looks friendly too, which is helpful for getting non-technical friends to join you on it.
I struggled with Nextcloud Talk too.
Highly recommend Jami 👍
Just so you know you can get push notifications on Jami. Jami has been supporting unified push notification for a while now, but it’s opt-in, some might not opt for it considering reducing privacy a bit, as some actually disable the proxy and some phone specific feature intending to prevent battery exhausting too fast.
For unified push support you can take a look at jami’s article about its unified push support. I use
ntfyBTW.
Element is pretty good
I recommend Peer Calls as an alternative. Peer Calls uses peer-to-peer communication similar to Jami. You can check out Peer Calls on Github for more info.
So, in short, the things I really like about it:
- Simple to selfhost - Only one Docker container with no dependencies (database, storage, etc.) and you only need to forward HTTP/S traffic.
- Lightweight - You get voice and text chat; screen and file sharing. All of it directly P2P.
- Private - Selfhosting the signaling server will grant you control over the only step which requires a central server during the WebRTC connection process.
- No accounts - Just start using, no accounts are involved.
