I’m in a tailscale network with everyone I want to chat with if that changes anything.

Must be/have:

  • Easy to roll out, not much harder/more involved than setting up something like discord ideally.
  • Clients available on Windows and Android and Linux of course.
  • Decentralized/Peer to Peer. I don’t want to set up a server computer but I will if I absolutely must. All devices behave as if they’re on the same LAN thanks to tailscale if that helps.

Would be nice to have:

  • Groups and sub groups like discord.
  • Stickers like telegram.
  • Voice/Video chat. I would miss desktop streaming a bit but I could always fall back to Discord if I must.

Is there anything at all like that? There are so many options it’s kind of overwhelming.

  • machinya [it/its, fae/faer]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    decentralized is the part that makes it hard to find. there are projects like briar (interesting project but very few features) and tox (had many features features but used to be quite unstable) and gnu jami (haven’t tried it in a decade) alongside others but tend to have a bunch of downsides. you can ignore some since you have a static list of contacts but you might want to look deep into them to learn the caveats.

    what I recommend is xmpp. is very lightway and easy to setup and gives you all the features you listed (not all clients support stickers but some do) but you need a server for that (any small one would work tho). matrix works also good but it’s way more complex and more geared towards group chats

      • machinya [it/its, fae/faer]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        why p2p isn’t popular

        my guess is because is quite hard to get it right in a generalized way. as you mention it, most people approach the internet as just consumers (not by choice) and p2p breaks this model. it requires interest and knowledge to succesfully use it and poses many problems not found in the standard client-server model (open ports, nat, global discovery). while there are known ways of solving them, they usually require workarounds and tend to have downsides. i remember following the tox development for a while and it had to use a central server for push notifications because general usage was very battery hungry.

        all of this problems make the projects quite niche so their development tends to be way slower than centralized one (usually sponsored by corpoations). they tend to lack user friendly interfaces and non-vital features so they fail to bring new users, specially non-technical ones. also, open source culture has been slowly going towards a corporate-friendly culture, making this type of software alien to many.

        edit: formatting