this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
259 points (95.8% liked)

Selfhosted

46654 readers
386 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz
259
Peersuite p2p encrypted discord alternative (lemmy.world)
submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by jerrimu@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
75 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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/

github - https://github.com/openconstruct/Peersuite

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] iopq@lemmy.world 39 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

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

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ladfrombrad@lemdro.id 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

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 ;)

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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?

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 5 days ago

Thank you! I'll be watching with great interest! Lots of potential :)

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago

They would have to guess the roomcode and password, it's pretty difficult to brute-force.

I'm planning some sort of auth system, but not sure how I wanna do it yet.

[–] themachine@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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?

[–] themachine@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Lucki@feddit.org 1 points 19 hours ago

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.

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

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,

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

ptt is live on git & site now.

[–] Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

@jerrimu A usability suggestion, having just tried it out - save the username and room password in the export file to make it more like a traditional chat experience. So when you import the chat file, the username and password are pre-populated along with the room name.

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

That's a really good idea! Now in the roadmap.

[–] martinb 4 points 5 days ago (3 children)

I feel like saving the password in the export is a bad idea if security is your thing

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] MITM0@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Does it have voice rooms yet ?

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

Voice is workspace-wide currently, there's no way to separate off as it stands now

[–] clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 12 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago

Hopefully gramma will figure it out, I'm a grandparent and I made it lol.

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago

I tried to make it super easy, but I'm not a UI guru or anything.

[–] Dumhuvud@programming.dev 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

AES-GCN

Galois/Counter Node?

Also, why didn't you drop a repository link? https://github.com/openconstruct/Peersuite - is it the one?

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 11 points 5 days ago

Yes it is, and I will add it, somehow I thought I did.

[–] TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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?

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

Get everybody in to at least try it. I tried to make everything as intuitive as possible.

[–] xnx@slrpnk.net 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Sounds great! Will mobile clients be impossible due to the p2p nature of it?

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 9 points 5 days ago

I'm working on getting an android version up, don't have a mac so I can't make an IOS version. It works great in mobile browsers, I have been testing on mbile during development.

[–] surfrock66@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Rocket chat needs a server, and doesn't e2e encrypt by default are this biggest differences.

[–] surfrock66@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago

That'as a noble endeavour, IDK if peersuite is the best app for that at the moment.

[–] secret300 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

feel-ford-bean-base

pass: poop

workspace code ^^^ for anyone that wants to test it out with me. I don't have friends to do so :(

[–] alphabethunter@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Do you have voice calls/group voice calls and streaming already in or in the roadmap?

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Group voice and video are working fine. I've only tested screen share with 3 computers but if works fine also.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›