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/
That’s so cool, but wouldn’t everyone need automat port forwarding/opening like UPnP IGD / PCP to initiate connection? Not everyone has this enabled
Not trying to shill, but seems like a perfect opportunity to integrate Tailscale for network access and then use the funnel feature to connect to peers.
As good as tailscale is, I do so loathe it. It does make things easy, but I have to trust a 3rd party with my traffic and for me thats just no bueno.
You can run your own, or community run, headscale server technically.
Yet you trust your isp, curious
Assumption on your end. I dont trust the ground I walk on.
I’ll look into it. currently using trystero-torrent.
Nah it uses https ports which are ususally open
This needs to be widely known. I didn’t test all the functions yet, but if this works, this is big!
Everything works!
And revolt was right there being all open source and stuff
Revolt uses a server.
Revolt is not E2EE, h fortunately.
How do you think matrix feels.
Go tell 'em! Why have alternatives if we can just put all our eggs in one, holey, basket?
You mean Matrix, surely
But it’s not decentralized
Libre Software? Push-To-Talk?
Yes and no, push to talk is on the roadmap, but haven’t implemented it yet.
Push to talk is now implemented! (you were not the first person to ask)
Sentences?
OP not your pet
The website gives a 404 error
I removed the dash at the end. Guess it was a typo
Is this open source? Otherwise this feels like a honey pot.
Kinda makes sense that honey pots show up here, idk there was another post the other day about some anonymous file sharing thing and it also seemed either a honeypot or just an amateur project which is okay in many cases but not when it’s about cryptography.
It’s fairly amateur I guess, but I’m not rolling my own cryptography or anything.
Asked the same question I was gonna, so I did the googling.
https://github.com/openconstruct/Peersuite
AGPL
completely! https://github.com/openconstruct/Peersuite
It’s peer-to-peer, there’s no server
The best way for self hosting is docker
🤔
It doesn’t contradict by definition. So ipfs is also decentralized yet you will need to run a client /server. So the client is also the server. Allowing you to connect to a mesh decentralized system. Just like torrent is also both a client and a server.
Yes, it takes an initial connection for discovery. The peers need to know how to find each other.
If there’s no account, how do I “log in” to my community or whatever
If you are hosting you send them the room code and a password. You can save a workspace and restart it later, so if you had an active chat it would reload automatically when you imported the file
That’s no what I’m asking. If I open the site and create a workspace, then close the window, how do I get back into my workspace?
I’m guessing if you were the last person to close this session, all chat would be lost, unless you saved it to the file.
OP mentioned that they were working on a self-host version that persists.
Just log back in with the room code and password.
I’ve looked into the sources because that was weird to me as well.
It’s because the web “client” is using nginx as a local web server. You’re selhosting the web client
The app still is 100% a frontend js client
OP did link to their public instance of the client, but gives more opportunities
It’s html and javascript, the release comes with loose chromium files, ffmpeg binary and a 190MB executable. The link typo hasn’t been fixed in hours, they don’t link to the github, they misuse terminology, etc. and it’s version 0.3.
That’s a no from me.
The link typo hasn’t been fixed in hours,
Whoa, hey, they’re not paid on-call. Give it a few days.
I’ve been babysitting my granddaughter, just got on the laptop.
How dare you
That’s fair, the project is about a month old, the electron releases will get an installer for some platforms.
Yeah it’s an early version and I have no doubt that you guys will make it a lot neater, and it seems like a nice project. I just think it breaks several basic rules of privacy and security oriented programming, which is why I don’t think it’s a good fit for this community just yet.
Noted. Thanks for the reralistic input
You should try out something that utilizes the normal system webview instead of electron that just bundles chromium.
Check out tauri
Tauri webview doesn’t support WebRTC, would have preferred that. Using system webview would be super iffy because of WebRTC support.
Ahhh interesting. I haven’t worked with webrtc so never ran into that!
You should ask for a refund.
I’ll spin this up in docker and check it out tomorrow
Let me know what you think!
So far really liking it! Very high quality screenshare, will be testing with more peers tonight. I had one question: I saw elsewhere you recommended running in docker for more permanence. Does that mean if everyone leaves a room and its hosted on docker things are saved and you can rejoin? Or would the last person leaving need to export the board? Either way I’m testing more tonight, just curious.
Thanks! Yeah if there’s bandwidth video streams at full resolution. Currently you have to export the workspace. I’m going to build a node server for it down the road. There are still things in my roadmap before then though.
Regardless, working great! It has many features that other discord alternatives don’t. I’ll be using it and following development closely!
I don’t want to rain on your parade, but to claim you’re a Discord alternative is like saying a box is a an alternative to a luxury resort. You’ve got a lot of work to do before being a Discord alternative.
Th UI isn’t there, hopefully someone with a great sense of design puts in a PR.
Yeah, some consider a room in a Prison a luxury resort 🤷♂️!
3 hot meals a day, a bed with a roof, and I don’t even have to work 3 jobs to afford it? Sign me up!
Thats the spirit ! 😁 You even make a lot of new friends (some are weird sickos tho 🤫 !)
It’s not a Discord alternative if it doesn’t have servers and doesn’t look anything like the Discord UI.
It’s worth noting that Discord misuses the term “server” to mean a community. When you create a Discord “server”, they aren’t booting up a machine just for you. So the lack of servers in this project has nothing to do with the ability to create groups of channels with shared moderators that represents a community.
Yeah, when Discord first became popular, the whole “server” terminology was massively confusing to me.
Sure, terminology is confusing here.
But this concept of communities and especially channels is exactly what I like about Discord. It’s their main concept. You can’t call Signal a Discord alternative either because it has call, screenshare and chats. It’s just a completely different UI concept.
Right, but this does have communities - they’re just called workspaces. The screenshot literally shows the equivalent to a Discord “server”. You’re getting confused by the correct usage of the term servers because this project doesn’t have backend servers
It’s P2P. How can these workspaces be equivalent to Discord servers? I’m confused. Also why are they called “workspaces”? Discord is tailored towards gamers.
From my understanding, currently the lack of a persistent superpeer makes a long-standing community unrealistic without someone remaining constantly connected, but once that’s implemented it would just be a persistent workspace. Publish the link in a centralized location for your project and bam, you’ve got the equivalent of an official discord server.
What functionality do you think is missing?
Don’t get me wrong. This software looks great in terms of features and functionality. I might give it a try. What I’m saying is that the concept is too different from Discord to be able to call it an alternative to replace Discord with. The way servers and channels in work in Discord is what makes Discord so unique and why I still use (this piece of shit corporate greedy garbage).
So it sounds like the lack of multiple text channels is the main missing feature? I haven’t used it myself yet so I’m assuming those don’t exist, but the concept of a server seems to be pretty one-to-one with a persistently hosted workspace.
(Just a heads up you don’t need to give a shit about this person’s opinion, they are a literal Nazi supporter)
Are you done? Is it your life’s mission to visit every threat of mine and write that? This threat is about a software and Discord. You don’t even know me. What are you on about?!
Besides, your claims are not even true. I have never supported Nazis. You just have a personal grudge against me (some rando on the internet) probably because I said some capitalistic views somewhere that you disagree with. I don’t even know. Your link doesn’t work.
Just block me if you don’t like me and move on…
Just a heads up you don’t need to give a shit about this person’s opinion
Also, isn’t that what a Nazi would say? I don’t say personally attacking shit like that about people.
No, but it has most of the features discord has.
Keep up the good work, it’s always good to have alternatives. But please at least fix the link in your post, it’s giving a bad first impression.
thanks!
cool in the same area as Retroshare
That was my first thought.
Any reason you chose github vs codeberg? Just wondering. Gave your project a star regardless. Nice work!
I’ve been on github for like 8 years now, familiarity, plus the build tools are nice, github actions builds the docker images for me now
This looks very promising, thank you very much! Going to fully test it out tomorrow.
Is there anything planned to have a persistent server option (self-hosted)?
Yes, I plan to create a node server for permanent rooms. It will allow you to name the server, which then acts like a superpeer and keeps the workspace open and saves progress every 10-30 minutes.
Wonderful! The possibility to spontaneously hop on the server to look whether a friend is online or not is very important at least for us compared to the necessity of having to set up the room each time (which would require us to coordinate beforehand that we want to hangout in a voice channel).
