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/
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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.
That sounds pretty cool! You have listed a lot of great privacy features. I’m sure you know they will likely restrict adoption, because Grandma probably won’t be able to figure it out.
It does look neat and I will give it a try.
I tried to make it super easy, but I’m not a UI guru or anything.
Hopefully gramma will figure it out, I’m a grandparent and I made it lol.
AES-GCN
Galois/Counter Node?
Also, why didn’t you drop a repository link? https://github.com/openconstruct/Peersuite - is it the one?
Yes it is, and I will add it, somehow I thought I did.
Well hell I may stand this up tonight. My only question is does the voice chat support push-to-talk?
Edit: Ok, gave it a spin. It does not support push-to-talk but being fully browser based I don’t think that’s a trivial thing to implement anyway.
That said, this is pretty sweet though certainly still rudimentary. I was really looking forward to the screen sharing but my friend on the other end said the quality and framerate were pretty bad. Not sure what flexibility there is as far as adjustable bit rate and framerate with what you’re doing but I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on this project.
Push to talk is in testing now. WebRTC changes quality automatically based on bandwidth. Its usually really good. It runs at full quality in testing ( i have like 6 devices I hook up and test). If you guys normally have a good connection, try again?
Perhaps talking about bitrate wasn’t correct of me. After looking at this again image quality itself is actually pretty good but the framerate is a different story.
To provide context, I used it to share the video game I was playing as my friends that use discord tell me they primarily stick to it for its screen sharing capability which they use when gaming.
I’m not sure how to best test this and provide metrics to you if this is improvable or even something you care about.
To attempt to take the connection factor out of the equation I opened two browser windows and viewed my own screen share from a different username and even then the framerate is not great.
How are you using it browser or electron? What OS? It looks great in my testing, wil ltry and reproduce the effect you’re getting,
Apologies for the long delay. I was using just the browser via your docker image but today I’ve done some testing with the electeon app.
Wonderful that you added PTT but it’s implementation has a flaw as the Peersuite window MUST be in focus for the PTT key to be read.
As far as the video goes, I’ve definitely confirmed that there’s is some serious frame drop which I’m assuming is directly related to the bitrate in same way. I had a friend on windows use the electron app and share his screen while I watched from the electron app on Linux. I took the following recording to better demonstrate what I’m saying. The quality has gone through multiple transcodes now but that’s not really important as the framerate is what I’m referring to anyway. https://files.catbox.moe/03f5b1.mkv
Maybe give https://vdo.ninja/?screenshare=&quality=0 a try? That’s also completely WebRTC direct connection based. Saved as a bookmark it’s simple to spin up a stream, so the chat decision is disconnected from the streaming.
ptt is live on git & site now.
My group recently switched to Matrix and so this would be a tough sell, but it seems interesting. I haven’t been a fan of Matrix and miss the ease of UI in discord, but was happy to leave with it’s direction. How would you sell it with a small group that has small, but mounting usability issues with Matrix?
Get everybody in to at least try it. I tried to make everything as intuitive as possible.
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.
P2p
yes peer to peer
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.
That’as a noble endeavour, IDK if peersuite is the best app for that at the moment.
Does it have voice rooms yet ?
Voice is workspace-wide currently, there’s no way to separate off as it stands now
Do you have voice calls/group voice calls and streaming already in or in the roadmap?
Group voice and video are working fine. I’ve only tested screen share with 3 computers but if works fine also.
I just realized it’s on the post. Sorry for that. This looks like a solid thing, for sure. Since we’re talking, do you ever worry about people making use of the privacy features for nefarious purposes?
I guess that could be an issue. I don’t think privacy makes you a criminal, but sure they want it. But so do tons of people who follow the rules. A Scottish Indepence group cloned it on github. That’s really coo to me, I love the idea of political dissidents using it, but the idea of it being used to hurt people does bother me.
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it uses WebRTC over https for anything, should just work