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Free software tools for staying in touch

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Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#81

Post by timeuser »

jeremija wrote: post #73

I've been developing peercalls.com on and off on since 2015. It's an open source peer to peer WebRTC audio/video calling service, allows the users to chat, share their desktop and send files (sending files is a little buggy at the moment, works best in Firefox). It has gotten a lot of interest in the past month and I noticed a spike in web traffic so I'm actively working on making it more scalable. I'm planning on im…

Thanks for sharing. It doesn't seem to work well in Safari on desktop or iOS. Seemed to connect but if you make the video larger than thumbnail or fullscreen it either doesn't show or only displays a small sliver.

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#82

Post by smichel17 »

zamalek wrote: post #67
atonse wrote: post #26

Going to put my bias out in the open. My whole career has benefited from Open Source, yet when I see something from the FSF, I automatically assume it's going to be ugly and not user-friendly. Has anyone tried any of these FSF sanctioned tools? I'd love to have my bias be proven wrong.

> Has anyone tried any of these FSF sanctioned tools? GNU seems to assume that average users are willing to tinker and struggle until they get something to work. Average users won't do this. If users are demanding things like animations and transitions, GNU software which can't even get onboarding right will always struggle. Personal experience: Bad: Mumble is a nightmare to admin. It has confusing popups and so fort…

Counterpoint: Mumble is by far the most reliable audio conferencing application I've used. Yes, the UX is quite old-fashioned and sometimes confusing. But once you've got everyone set up with it, audio transmission works flawlessly, and at the end of the day that's more than I can say about many of the alternatives.

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#83

Post by gentleman11 »

_snsh wrote: post #80
gentleman11 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RMS said one of the inspirations for free software was a particular printer he couldn’t get to work because of a driver issue. The company refused to give him the source code, and iirc said he was not allowed to write his own for it. He did not forgive or forget this slight, and we live in the world he helped create as a result

I did find it, it was Eric Raymond and "The Luxury of Ignorance" http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html

I think I may have heard it from one of his talks.

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201...

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#84

Post by ntw1103 »

rakoo wrote: post #79
ntw1103 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was sad to see that matrix wasn't on the list. Another great feature of Matrix, is that it is a lot easier to setup that xmpp.

I just installed synapse with Riot, and I have to say it's the exact contrary. Some of the steps are not documented, I had to read the code to understand what to do. XMPP with Prosody on the other hand is one of the easiest servers I've ever had to install

Out of curiosity, what guide did you follow? I followed the docs right on github for synapse, and it was pretty easy. That being said, It was awhile back, and it looks like they've updated the synapse guide.

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#86

Post by zamalek »

smichel17 wrote: post #82
zamalek wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Has anyone tried any of these FSF sanctioned tools? GNU seems to assume that average users are willing to tinker and struggle until they get something to work. Average users won't do this. If users are demanding things like animations and transitions, GNU software which can't even get onboarding right will always struggle. Personal experience: Bad: Mumble is a nightmare to admin. It has confusing popups and so fort…

Counterpoint: Mumble is by far the most reliable audio conferencing application I've used. Yes, the UX is quite old-fashioned and sometimes confusing. But once you've got everyone set up with it, audio transmission works flawlessly, and at the end of the day that's more than I can say about many of the alternatives.

Oh totally. I used it for years for gaming and there has never been something as reliable. Once set up, the security was also really great.

The average me will just struggle to get the average family to use it.

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#87

Post by em-bee »

_snsh wrote: post #66
atonse wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the great summary. I should've been more clear. I've learned a lot about OBS in the past couple of weeks and it really seems to be the king (for streamers). I'm already familiar with XMPP but feel Matrix is a much better and more modern successor. I grew up on IRC but it probably needs a lot of modern security enhancements.

Well, at least in my opinion, it was a good question and the answer across the board is "Yes, these solutions need to be more accessible". A good part of that is corporations not giving back to OSS but I also think that a large part of OSS developers are missing the point (I keep remembering the story of that one these OSS guy trying to get his printer working but I can't remember his name to find the link).

how are they missing the point?

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#88

Post by [deleted] »

tw04 wrote: post #9
oDot wrote: post #4

Zoom is still the best performing software. Alternatives fail in various ways. I wrote Emergency Remote[0], and for some companies thrown into the situation it is best to use it anyway. They can't handle more trouble during this time. [0] https://www.emergencyremote.com/EmergencyRemote.pdf

I fundamentally disagree. Webex has been around longer and despite the zoom founder trying to trash it, has been more reliable for me. They just apparently spent their money on building an enterprise-worthy app instead of marketing. https://help.webex.com/en-us/n80v1rcb/Cisco-Webex-Available-...

[deleted]

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#89

Post by jeremija »

timeuser wrote: post #81
jeremija wrote: post #73

I've been developing peercalls.com on and off on since 2015. It's an open source peer to peer WebRTC audio/video calling service, allows the users to chat, share their desktop and send files (sending files is a little buggy at the moment, works best in Firefox). It has gotten a lot of interest in the past month and I noticed a spike in web traffic so I'm actively working on making it more scalable. I'm planning on im…

Thanks for sharing. It doesn't seem to work well in Safari on desktop or iOS. Seemed to connect but if you make the video larger than thumbnail or fullscreen it either doesn't show or only displays a small sliver.

Thanks for reporting the bug! I thought I'd fixed this issue. Which version of MacOS/iOS/Safari are you using?

Edit: I just realized that I just hadn't pushed the latest version which contained this fix. v3.0.17 is up and running now (was v3.0.15). Please let me know if you continue to experience this or any other issue!

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#90

Post by rakoo »

ntw1103 wrote: post #84
rakoo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just installed synapse with Riot, and I have to say it's the exact contrary. Some of the steps are not documented, I had to read the code to understand what to do. XMPP with Prosody on the other hand is one of the easiest servers I've ever had to install

Out of curiosity, what guide did you follow? I followed the docs right on github for synapse, and it was pretty easy. That being said, It was awhile back, and it looks like they've updated the synapse guide.

I installed Matrix behind Caddy, so I followed:

- The archlinux guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Matrix - The official doc of running it behind a proxy: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/docs/rever...

I couldn't really test if it worked as-is, so I needed to install Riot web, still behind a proxy. It was also going to be my client of choice. That's where things got fun:

- Installing the arch package doesn't do anything, it's just a bunch of static files, so you have to know how to serve them after that - Riot needs to go to your matrix's /.well-known/matrix/client, so you need to redirect it to your synapse server (and the previous redirect is not enough, because the previous redirect only cares about _matrix, not the root level) - It failed for me because a setting in the synapse config (server_name) wasn't set, so I had to read the code of synapse to understand how this well-known endpoint is served.

All in all it was still doable, but took more manual steps than I expected.

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