Setting out for calls and conferences | Hacker News Reader

Setting out for calls and conferences

dino.im

57 pointsrglullis15 comments

Congratulations on acquiring the funding.

> Support for encrypted two-party calls that are compatible with Conversations should be ready by the end of this year or early next year.

Exactly a year ago I made the same announcement with the same timeline for Conversations. In the end it took me until ~April of this year and I giant kick in the butt from a global pandemic to finish it.

Let's hope that they beat my timeline.

it's been a long time since I've been excited by an XMPP implementation, but Dino made me feel that old zing. I would like to see some monetization strategy than just donations though. I'm old and paranoid.

The developers from Conversations have their own managed server offering [0] and IMHO are really setting the bar for XMPP nowadays. I am also running a paid/managed offering via Communick [1] and I hope that I can make it profitable to be able to get a share of the profits to them.

Question is, would you pay for a hosted XMPP server? If not for you (because you probably already have your server) would you pay for other people in your contact list to make it easier for network effects to kick in?

[0] : https://account.conversations.im

[1] : https://communick.com

If I had my own company and 4 people I would pay. Especially if that way I head off people deciding to use slack while I was busy getting business :)

You can still do it for a personal account and the prices are so low that you really have no excuse not to.

Conversations.im is 8€/year. I am offering now Communick with XMPP/Matrix/Mastodon hosting for 5€/10 users/3 months. It is almost as low as the average donation.

With their given timeline of 12 months, I think this project will complete after the horse has bolted (the horse being a metaphorical Pandemic/crisis)

I think it's not unlikely that the pandemic has not gone away by next year.

Or that secure teleconferences are irrelevant come 2022.

In terms of "indie" video call providers that are available right now -- we've been looking at https://whereby.com and https://team.video and pretty happy with both. It's not all the way self-hosted of course, but it feels a little bit better not using a behemoth. And the quality is better anyway.

Calls are also a very nice feature independent of the pandemic, so I don't think that's an issue ;) Besides that, the post says that there'll be 1:1 calls in a few months already.

Since Dino has been packaged for OpenBSD now I just tried it out. It seems to be a simple XMPP client with a nice clean interface. Supports OMEMO and OpenPGP for encyption. Could use a scarier icon for the unencrypted case...

Probably worth checking out if you are looking for something simple and straightforward. Adding video support in the same way would make for a nice experience.

Having deployed my own Jitsi server which works well any reason why I might consider moving to Dino (just for video)?

Dino is an XMPP client, so you will be getting chat. You would then need to connect to an XMPP server and set up the client to use your Jitsi server as the place for conferences.

Dino is native, which means it is more likely to get proper support of hardware accelerated video encoding/decoding, best case leading to less energy consumption during video calls.

My Laptop's fan always runs full speed when being in a Jitsi conference for more than a few minutes.

I absolutely love anything and everything to do with XMPP. keep up the good work!

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