Hey everyone.
I make Peersuite, an opensource free communication platform.
It’s private by default, there’s no sign-in or email collection.
It’s peer-to-peer, there’s no server, after discovery you are connected directly to your friends my AES-GCN encrypted WebRTC channels. It forms a mesh and identifies superpeers. Because there is no server, in order to save your data between sessions, you can download your workspace into a password encrypted file. Happy to answer any questions.
FEATURES: chat with images, PMs, channels, and file send group audio/video calling screensharing kanban board whiteboard for diagrams/flowchartswith PNG export collaborative document editing with formatted PDF export
The best way for self hosting is docker, its on dockerhub as openconstruct/peersuite. You can also download desktop versions from the github or use on the web at https://peersuite.space/
This space definitely needs competition
I like Matrix, but I do run into issues, like messages not being decrypted even though I verified my session. The average user is not ready for it. Or rather, it’s not ready for the average user
EVERYTHING is encrypted in peersuite, it’s mandatory. I tried to make the UI intuitive and simple, but IDK if I’m great at it.
but IDK if I’m great at it.
Simples is best, hands down. Maybe some tooltips wouldn’t go amiss on your demo page?
But as someone else pointed out, a link to the GitHub either in the header or footer of your demo page would be ace too. It was the first thing I looked for this morning seeing your posts and had to come back to the comments to find it 🙈
Keep up the great work, and I shared between our nerd group and they have eyeballs on it. Seems a no brainer for teams collaborating online where we’ve got used of shitty Slack 🤢 Dicksword whatever.
ninjaedit: if you want some help Android app wise, give us a ping. I have a few bored devs lurking looking for app ideas ;)
I think I’m going to go the route of buildind a PWA first then using bubblewrap to generate an APK. I tried capacitor, but audio/video didn’t work, it has meh WebRTC support.
I have been exploring self-hosted Discord alternatives and had been looking at Rocket Chat, so I am wondering what is the pitch for this versus something like that? I am very early in my exploration, of course.
Rocket chat needs a server, and doesn’t e2e encrypt by default are this biggest differences.
Ok, understood. So if you’re not online, you pretty much lose messages, or are they cached and the next time the sender is online you get them?
My use case is a kid using a minecraft server and wants to talk to his friends, and we’re using mumble now, but they want “discord” and they want things like plugins that allow mgmt from the discord channels, which I would be willing to try to develop, but the model pretty much requires a server to be online.
In general, I’m trying to make a small internet for my kids and their friends to have “normal” internet experiences without being on the wider internet. No youtube, but pinchflat -> jellyfin. No discord, but mumble. No google drive, but nextcloud.
A couple of questions. If I was trying to keep a consistent workspace to build a community around, would it be persistent after the host logs off, and are their tools to protect it from trolls etc who discover it a workspace?
It would not be persistent. You can download a workspace to an encrypted file. I have plans to make a node.js server for workspace permanence.
Does it have voice rooms yet ?
Voice is workspace-wide currently, there’s no way to separate off as it stands now
I’m gonna try this when I get time to tinker around since my friend and I are becoming exceedingly weary of Discord for communication. I also hate how bulky and rigid it is in its design.
Edit: Tested it on LAN between my PC and phone; it’s easy to get running and works great. Some buttons seem invisible on mobile, like the channels list, so I had a hard time joining the “general” channel upon connecting to the workspace. I want to test it with my friend to see how it works across networks but it seems really promising so far.
What kind of phone? I do testing during development and it works fine on my tablet.
I have a Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G. It seems like anything near the bottom of the screen gets cut off and I’m not able to scroll down to see it.
I have a galaxy I test on, what can’t you see? Could you take some screenshots?
I just tested it again and now #general shows up right after I join on mobile. I think it’s possible that I was having network/browser issues or something at the exact moment I tried it before. :p
I am really into this, it was such a breeze to set up. Are there plans to offer more customization options like custom CSS, an editable configuration file, or something like that? I have a Podman container set up and I’m thinking of creating a volume mount to add some very basic styling but official support would be great.
No current plans, but that would be a great idea! If you just want to edit the CSS, it’s all in index.html
Ah, no worries for now. I took out the inline CSS and replaced it with an external file, so I’ll work on that.
I made some minor adjustments already, like removing the transform on hover and having the whiteboard to expand to fit its container, so that’s nice. Have you thought about implementing draw.io or excalidraw?
Someone mentioned excalidraw on github also. If it would blend into the rest of the UI I wouldn’t mind, I’m not in love with the one I made lol. Could you make a PR with your changes on github? So far nobody has contributed any CSS changes, and I know I’m not great at design.