janus-gateway VS spreed

> despite WebRTC mostly being about client/client communication

This is actually kind of a misconception, though it’s an understandable one given that WebRTC is almost always pitched as a peer-to-peer protocol.

In practice, most people using WebRTC for video are sending their video to a server, not directly to another client. It’s pretty safe to assume that most people who use your app are going to need TURN, and at that point, you’re not really doing peer-to-peer at all, so you might as well just have your browser-based app talk to a server that’s pretending to be another browser.

These servers (called Selective Forwarding Units or SFUs) can operate like a TURN server in the case of a one-on-one call, but they can also multiplex everyone’s feeds in the case of a larger conference (peer-to-peer 5 person calls would require each participant to send 4 copies of their video) and often have extra features like the ability to record calls, transcode streams or convert to other protocols.

The one I’ve used a lot is called Janus[0], it’s open source and has good docs, I recommend people check it out if they’re interested in getting deeper into WebRTC or other video streaming tech.

[0] https://janus.conf.meetecho.com

OpenTalk is a young project for creating online meeting software similar to Jitsi or BigBlueButton. It is a completely new development, and while it is not a fork of an existing open-source project, it integrates with other projects such as the Janus WebRTC server, Redis for volatile state, RabbitMQ for communication between server instances, and PostreSQL for persistent state.

I've been looking into Janus WebRTC Server due to the ability for Uv4L to join Janus rooms (I'm building a RaspberyyPi doorbell)

A related answer to the above is to check out Janus. It's a general purpose WebRTC server that has RTMP and FTL ingest support. I think it's also batteries not included, but I think it's what Glimesh is based on.

I've been using Janus gateway for similar. Pretty easy to setup.

A number of open-source projects also exist, which give developers a great head start if they're looking to build their own infrastructure - the most popular of these include Jitsi, Mediasoup, Janus, and Pion. These projects provide a layer of abstraction and expose a number of helper functions to perform various tasks, such as creating transports, etc. They have helpful guides on how to get started, but you would still face the aforementioned issues regarding scaling, resources, etc.

This all changes when you are actually a domain expert: You can treat the various components as a "white box" because you see the forest for the trees and can make cross-cutting assumptions which will inherently make the code faster. I've noticed a lot of projects written by domain experts are often these giant clusterfucks of C that violate pretty much every guideline there are so many Medium blogs about, and yet they're very stable and widely used. See: https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway for example.

Yes, there are many self-hosted options out there. https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway works well for multi-party video with up to about 15 users in a room assuming everyone has a reasonably reliable connection.

- Janus (C / C++)

> Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source.

Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/

Rocket.Chat: https://www.rocket.chat/

Nextcloud Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Self hosting and some assembly required. I've run all of them on cheap VPSes to explore a Slack/Discord replacement, neither was mindblowing but all of them seemed okay (Nextcloud's offering was rather barebones, though).

Audio and video support varies because getting those right is challenging, at best you'd just integrate with something like Jitsi, that one's actually pretty good for meetings and such: https://jitsi.org/ and has a cloud version too: https://meet.jit.si/ (yet people still go for Zoom and it's odd UI/UX choices)

I actually rather liked forums back in the day, but I guess nobody will be setting up that many phpBB instances in the current year, though projects like Discourse also seem promising: https://www.discourse.org/

I don't think many people at all will be leaving Discord, due to how entrenched the platform is (network effect): if you want people to help you with what you're working on, you go where they are, not vice versa.

To add to this, it's reasonably easy to run, and has many different plugins, from a calendar and contacts list, to an online document editor (like Google Docs, except it can be pretty slow and/or resource intensive: https://nextcloud.com/office/), to a simple clone of Slack (https://nextcloud.com/talk/), a mail client (https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/mail) and other things.

That said, I've had updates (across major versions) break things on multiple occasions, one out of two servers running the exact same version has random crashes and in addition to that the file locking by default (if enabled, but not using Redis: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/config...) has broken and prevents me from deleting a file that just sits there and takes up a few GB of space. Oh and their Android app fails to upload files if I use the share option, instead of the file picker from within the app.

On the other hand, sure beats storing data on third party clouds and is free, so I'll still keep using it.

> The calendar app is very functional and allows booking of appointments based on availability similar to Calendly. This is one of many apps within its large and expanding suite.

Another noteworthy one is Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

It's not quite as good as something like a self-hosted instance of Mattermost or even Rocket.Chat, but honestly if you already have Nextcloud, then it's pretty cool to be able to get something decent like that up and running quickly.

Ofc that's making Nextcloud a single point of failure in some ways and occasionally things can go sideways with these plugin based platforms (historically applies more to installs of Jenkins, but also have had some performance issues with Nextcloud that had lots of apps, too).

I still rather like Nextcloud because of being able to just run it on my servers and replace a bunch of other third party cloud platforms and still somehow manage to have good enough uptime and security.

Internal chat/communication

Nextcloud Talk (version 15.0.3): Have private video calls and chat using your own server.

Nextcloud Talk

Nextcloud has a chat app https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Nextcloud with the Talk extension can do exactly what you are looking for! https://nextcloud.com/talk/