Firstly: Yes, I like Synapse / Cinny / Element too…don’t hate me…but needs must when the devil drives…
For reasons that are too complex to get into (TL;DR: hodge podge of equipment from the dawn of time, from intransigent family members, complexity over HTTP vs HTTPS…they usual nonsense when you volunteer to become the family sysadmin) I’ve been looking at different methods for a persistent, family chat experience that I can “self host”.
Does anyone know much about Jami?
From what I can see, it has the following worthwhile features:
- FOSS/GPL
- Android, Windows, Linux, macOS and iOS.
- Text messaging ,group chats, video calls
- File sharing, E2EE etc etc
- It apparently works over a LAN with no Internet connection at all, which is particularly interesting to me.
- Federation not required.
- CA not required
- Transparent handoff with Tailscale
From what I can see, there’s a headless jami-daemon for Linux. Jami’s own docs specifically suggest putting an existing account on an always-online server to facilitate message exchange, with multiple servers possible for redundancy.
So…that’s…good.
OTOH, there isn’t a Synapse-equivalent central Jami server holding everyone’s accounts and rooms. Accounts and conversations are distributed across the participating devices, though as I said above, it looks like Jami does support an always-online daemon/device to improve message availability.
I dunno what to make of it. It seems…too good to be true.
Has anyone use it? Particularly, is the always-online jami-daemon actually dependable for store-and-forward behavior in practice?
Postscript: it went terribly. That is…it worked perfectly on test devices / with test accounts. Then I thought "ok…this has potential! Then it shat the bed, in a way I couldn’t grok (and frankly, I didn’t have the energy to trouble shoot).
Then I thought “fine…clearly Jami is flaky. LiveKit and MatrixRTC are shitty with Synapse…I know X wants to video call Y…let me try a clean cut over to Continuwuity + Tailscale”.
…and now I hate everything and everyone.
So, that probably means I will try Jami again one more time and then just switch to Snikket.
The moral of the story is: I should have played with dollies as a kid instead of computers, because this exact pattern of fuckery has been the bane of my existence near on half a century now.
Le-fucking-sigh.
Fuck it; I’m going get Claude to set this up. “Claude, take the fucking wheel and make no mistakes.”
Ahhh, sorry to hear it :(
Probably we’d all be happier :)
Good luck! I hope it goes well
Unlikely…but I will try again. For fun