I’m looking for something that can do chat, video calling with support for guess links and chats. I need it to work in the browser so I can send people a link to a chat session. Bonus if it has a simple mobile app and calendar integration.
Anyone know of something that isn’t Nextcloud Chat?
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Matrix with the Jitsi meet plugin.
I already made a comment but you should also look at rocketchat and revolt, since they are basically FOSS discord clones
(I saw comments in the thread about wanting audio only calls.)
I’ve been using self-hosted Jitsi Meet for a few weeks now. Works perfectly. Haven’t tried the calendar feature, though.
Vdo.ninja
You want either mattermost or the whole matrix stack (backend, plus element with voice/video calls).
Matrix/Element is more of a discord alternative, whereas mattermost tries to be more of a slack alternative, where it seems to have some calendar integrations.
There is no way to do what teams does without significant infrastructure. Same with Slack and others.
If you want something that just gets close to the mark, look at Jitsi. It’s about as complete as you could expect for just video/voice.
What you may not understand about conferencing platforms is that they are dozens of different hosted services working together to provide a cohesive UE. Video, SIP, VOIP, auth, identity…these are all separate services that are deployed as microservices to get what you get. If you find the bare minimum of the services you actually need, you can probably cobble something together, but it’s not going to be a simple running of one service to get the same experience.
If you want something to mangle the formating on his Office documents there really is no alternatives available sadly. Chat there is.
I’m hosting a matrix server with a TURN server and it’s fairly easy to selfhost. This sounds exaggerated.
That just covers voice/video. OP is asking about a lot more.
And chat. But yeah, no groupware.
Video+chat is all I’m wanting for the most part
Do you need Element for that? Also is there a way to do guest access with a link?
You can allow guest accounts, although it’s disabled by default in synapse.
Call supports depends on the client you’re using. Element is usually ahead in features implementation, but you can get a list of clients and filter by features in the matrix website.
Also I’m not sure what the other person meant by easy to setup. Matrix servers are notoriously hard to setup when compared to anything most things you would find yourself selfhosting, specially with WebRTC/TURN. I think there’s an ansible playbook somewhere, but I never tried it.
It isn’t that hard. All I’m looking for is a chat/video call service. Jitsi is close but it purely does video calling. I want something that is a chat where guests can join a group with a link. That shouldn’t take much. (It didn’t with Nextcloud)
@possiblylinux127 mattermost should do the trick. @just_another_person
Then write a howto instead of asking here. That shouldn’t take much.
Honestly I might put that on my list of cool projects
It is easier than you think. There are libraries that do Firewall/NAT traversal automatically so the hard part would be making the UI
It is easier than you think.
I never said how easy I think it is so what are you basing this response on?
Well if “it shouldn’t take much”, then it shouldn’t be hard to find a solution, right?
I’m now wondering why you’re here asking this question if you fully understand what you’re asking about.
It’s actually not that hard. (Well it is, media and networking are hard, but)
I think the problem is that when people search for something better than Teams (or any other software), they confuse “better than”, with a mostly nonexistent “best”. In doing so, they skip over the way every single thing people suggest is “good enough”.
Like, following this thread, we went from “I want a teams (voice/video/chat) alternative” to “Yeah I don’t like Jami because it leaks metadata.” How did we go from wanting a teams alternative, to wanting privacy with no metadata leakage? Those are very different things, and you make tradeoffs if you take one set of feature over the other. If you just add “no metadata leakage” on top of your current wishes, then you are probably going to be disatisfied with every option given.
Or “Firewalls and hole punching!” (implying a p2p architecture) and “depends on peers being reliable” (being frustrated with the pitfalls of a p2p architecture). Again, wtf? Of course there is software that is both p2p and client server, but that is hard and tradeoffs will end up being made, even purely in what the developer spends their limited time on.
This person just needs to get out of their head, whip up deployments for every software (or suite if there is more than one) mentioned in the thread, and pick the one that looks the nicest.
It’s not hard. Just Teams but self-hosted. Free would be ideal.
/s
Right? I just want to self-host something like Google and all their services, but free. It also has to run on an AMD K6-2 with 1GB of DDR1 RAM and under 20GB for storage. Please don’t ask me any questions, I know exactly what I’m doing.
Uhm actually the k6-2 took EDO or SDRAM. You won’t get it running with DDR.
Jitsi is close but it purely does video calling.
Not sure what you mean by that. Turn off the camera and you’ve got an audio chat.
I want something that is a chat where guests can join a group with a link.
That’s exactly how Jitsi works.
Signal is not self hosted but they also support videoconference style calls.
Jitsi is closer to Zoom than anything else
I’m looking for the chat plus the ability to start a call
I see. What about Matrix?
I haven’t tried it myself but Mattermost offers most of what you’re looking for.
I think a gitlab install has most of mattermost inside it, and that means installation and updates are handled. I found the install of MatterMost via its devs used to be very naive, but the gitlab people did something right in vendoring it into their massive install. Gitlab-ce is bloated as heck, but it’s fire-and-forget on the proper platform and may allow inter-org linking with or without the matter bridge thing (which itself affords some interoperability).
I use jami but i dont think it fits your need for guess links.
Still leave it here just in case
Jami is a free/libre, end-to-end encrypted, and private communication software.
Jami is a stability and security nightmare
I wouldn’t recommend it
Please tell us more about the actual security problems!
Have you actually dug into the internals? It is pretty bad. Large poorly maintained code base with poor cryptography. Theoretically it is fine but I’d rather use Signal.
No, I rarely read the code of software I use, especially crypto code since thant’s not my thing. But good to know that you did. Thanks for your opinion.
It’s true there are a lot of better alternatives to jami when it comes to privacy/security: Here’s a good comparison table:
Care to expand on that? I am seriously considering that as part of my post-skype future.
I would look into Jami, Signal and maybe Simplex Chat
Im using it for 3 months now and I did not notice any stability issue. One time I experienced a long delay in receiving a message.
Do you have any details on why its a security nightmare?
All communications are peer-to-peer and end-to-end encrypted.
It is a massive code base which doesn’t seem to get a lot of maintenance due to lack of developers. Jami also lacks a security audit which doesn’t build confidence
From a security perspective it uses dTLS which isn’t great for metadata sensitive applications. Message delivery is also finicky since it depends on peers working reliably.
I like Jitsi, but when I record a session it always silently aborts after about 40 minutes.
Self hosting allows you to improve screen share framerate
We use this at work. Great for screen sharing and video chat
- no enterprise packaging
- java?
I mean, that’s two strikes, but I know the people whom 8x8 bought in like 2019 so there’s hope. Like, wow, their video-conf app and service was astoundingly good.
Element Server Suite Community https://github.com/element-hq/ess-helm
I would suggest avoiding anything that is a “community” or “personal use only”. If its not fully open its not worth it.
I think Mattermost is intended to be just that.
Check out Big Blue Button - https://demo.bigbluebutton.org/
Their website talks all about using it for teaching students but it’s really just like Jitsi with more features.
Big bluebutton is now integrated into Canvas, an open source learning management software (LMS) that every school I have went to has used.
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Huly is pretty amazing and has a self host option. It supports chats and video calls, team rooms, and has some cool integration for speech to text note taking. It also functions as a task tracker.
Under super active development right now so host only if you can deal with occasional breaking changes.
Cloud based solutions in selfhosted are a hilarious suggestion.
I’m selfhosting it on box next to me. Wasn’t so hard for me to find the GitHub link on their website.
Idk, I’ve heard things about HooliChat… Didn’t their stream go down in the middle of a big title fight?
Plus that Gavin Belson guy keeps trying to jam his horrible signature into his products.
That guy is the woooorst
Considering
- nearly a
curl|shsetup - to run supply-chain risks
- of supply-chain risks
- for something without an immutable artefact and thus is its own supply-chain risk
It’s already breaking ISO27002 in a few ways. I’m out.
- nearly a
What’s their revenue model? Thanks for sharing
They have a SaaS option as well, I’m guessing that’s the main revenue plan.
Anyone know of something that isn’t Nextcloud Chat?
Do you absolutely need to put ONE tag on it all and say this is it?
I have not tried Matrix yet but I hear it’s a good replacement, fashioned more to the likes of Discord but I think it has everything you’re looking for
I’ve been using matrix for quite a while now and I’m very happy with it.
The thing to be aware of though is that it takes quite a bit of work to get started, but once you’ve got it up and running it doesn’t need much coddling. It’s got video calling built into it now and can be entirely web based if you want it to be. I have all of my signal, WhatsApp and SMS messages being brodged over through it which is handy. I’ve also got a discord bridge set up which will bring all DMs and let’s me bridge any of the servers I want to bring over.
it’s been my one app for communicating with anyone that wants to talk to me on any IM platform I use, as well as any of the federated rooms and spaces I want to access from other home servers I want to work with.
Edit: I also recently added authentication via oidc which was great as now I don’t need to worry about passwords as I just authenticate with passkeys on most of my self hosted services.
No!
