GNU/Jami, a distributed voice, video and chat platform | Hacker News Reader

GNU/Jami, a distributed voice, video and chat platform

jami.net

72 pointssubins200024 comments

I've repeatedly tried, but I have not been able to get Jami to work. At all.

Text messages sent between a Linux PC and an Android device are delivered less than 25% of the time. Neither audio or video calls will connect in either direction.

There are several open bugs on the Jami Gitlab page regarding similar problems on Android but there are no fixes available.

I can't say if Jami is useful in situations where both endpoints are computers and/or iOS devices, but it's completely useless for use cases where one of the parties involved in a communication could be using an Android device.

Are there any working ad free, commercial surveillance free, video chat tools out there? I'm currently self-hosting Jitsi Meet, but that has no video support on Safari and has an artificial video quality limit of 360p on mobile devices. Is there anything better?

I have no problems with iOS to iOS and iOS to Raspberry Pi. Compiled it for Raspberry Pi myself.

For the self-compiled one I initially set up the dependencies in the wrong way and the connection wouldn’t work, but I got help on the Gitlab page.

> Are there any working ad free, commercial surveillance free, video chat tools out there?

Matrix.

https://matrix.org/

Matrix is not, in and of itself, a video chat protocol; the clients that support video use Jitsi for it.

Qtox seems functional and stable but not very popular. https://qtox.github.io/

Mumble is fine if you can give up the video portion. My work uses Zoom, but, frankly a conference call would always suffice. I’m very skeptical of the value-add of video in meetings.

Nextcloud Talk is pretty painless to install and mostly works. Last problems I remember were with with clients not always ringing and connecting, especially over 4G. I've used it with family for 1-1 video calls for a while and it was good enough.

https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Tox[0] actually works, reliably.

Jami, I've never managed to.

[0] https://tox.chat/

Recently started following this project. Looks really promising, and I’m excited to see where it goes. The one deal breaker for me (aside from bugs) is cross-platform syncing. I need to be able to continue conversations on my laptop from my phone. It’s probably very difficult to implement, which is understandable.

An interesting project. I used it for a while, but wound up switching to Riot (now Element)/Matrix due to it being easier to get my friends onto Matrix then Jami.

I'm Ryan f8f8e58db7f991541cb1cbb9e16c077b24ecadce :) Install Jami and let's chat!

I really want to love Jami.

I have not gotten it working in the past, but I just installed it on my new setup, and since people here will be doing the same: Let's chat!

agreed! would really like this to be something big.

needs to work out some kinks for sure (styling, audio sending, etc) and also should have a much lower barrier to entry (maybe a browser-based webRTC version)

Overall great idea and not hard to set up if you aren't a total noob. Sadly tho, can't see many normal users opting for this over Zoom or GotoM. :(

First of all THANK YOU JAMI DEVS! All the love. You're the best. I offer this all with a spirit of hope and love.

I had a nice little chat with another HN user, and I want to report back:

Both of us are on linux, and we tried to use: a) voice call, did not work, autofail

b) voice messages - recording them has no audio levels or visual feedback if it's working, and there's no option to hear what you've recorded before sending it. We both sent audio messages and neither arrived, or even appeared in the chat log.

c) even the test chat has wonkiness - like awkward line/word wrap.

d) Messages in the chat log have a greyed-out 'undelivered' vibe, but the grayout remains after messages have been read and replied to. It doesn't inspire confidence.

I WANT to love Jami SO BADLY. I want to tell my friends we can use something open instead of Signal!

Please, if there are any Jami devs here, please speak up and ask for help. The community is paying attention right now, this is a golden opportunity to get developer eyes on Jami code!

Another report before I must get back to work:

I was able to have a videocall successfully with someone on the other side of the planet - but no audio!

Is there a way to run some kind of test suite?

I'm over at a7ecf4f43c643123669adca7efcd5f09b749d4ae (I'm up for a test everyone)

Did a test with Ryan and video call worked (with no audio). But, audio doesn't. Voice messages didn't work, video messages didn't too.

Text & video works good!

This is what was known as GNU Ring and before that SFLphone.

GNU Ring was a better name IMO. I feel embarrassed to ask people to install "Jami"

I wonder what the motivation for rebranding was. Could be "ring" is a poor choice in other cultures.

Perhaps people confused it with the eponymous video-doorbell product?

According to their announcement it was because there're trademark-protected commercial products that use the name Ring and for marketing[1].

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20181219044411/https://ring.cx/e...

Related from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24810464

Wasn't this posted last week?

I'm not sure why they rebranded the project again. I recall the "1.0" version they launched back when it was called Ring wasn't as stable as a 1.0 should be.

Is anyone using this?

Doesn't seem to support 32-bit computers.

It does provide 32-bit packages for multiple Linux distros and Android. So 32 bit computers seem to be supported.

OK, but not for Windows, it seems.

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