I have a page about chat-related free code projects, open standards and
common protocols here (Disintermedia wiki is having issues right now but
should be back up soon):
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/core-us
One of the things I noticed in gathering this list is that there isn't just
one application for realtime comms software. There are lots of different
kinds of realtime communication that can happen online; one-to-one (chat),
group-to-group (conference), one-to-crowd (livestream presentation),
group-to-crowd (livestream panel discussion). Then there are other forms of
group chat that are semi-asynchronous (IRC, Slack-a-likes). No one chat apps
needs to do all of these things, but to have any chance of displacing Skyte,
Hangups FarceBook Messenger, Zoomin, and Slick, we need user-friendly apps
that between them cover all of these use cases.
Some of these use cases make more sense as client-side apps (one-to-one
chat), ideally without a server. Although I've heard pure P2P chat networks
like GNU Ring and Tox make it hard to transport an identity/ address between
devices, and create engineering challenges for supporting mobile use cases.
Others use cases make more sense as web apps, if you're having a group chat
using a server, why not use a web client running on that server? One answer
might that you are a business or a political organisation who want to own
your private comms, but then you can run the servers hosting the chat
back-end and the web client yourselves.
Mumble is one of the few free code chat apps I've managed to get working and
get some use out of. Mainly because most of the complexity is outsourced to
whoever is running the Murmur servers I connect to, and Mumble doesn't
increase its complexity by an order of magnitude by trying to support video.
But a lot of people really struggle with the IRC-like UX, and recommending
Mumble to someone looking for a Skyte replacement really isn't good user
support :{
As I've said in a number of threads on these forums when the topic of
realtime comms comes up, I'm keen to form a team and meet regularly (one a
month or fortnight) to test different free code chat apps together. We can
get a clearer sense of which use cases each package is suited to, and give
some quality feedback to the devs about our experiences. If anyone is keen,
you can use the direct message system in these forums to send me an email, or
look up my contact page on the Disintermedia wiki (when it's working again):
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/danyl-strype
