There have been a few recent threads here about or pointing to Jami (former Ring, still ring in some directories), so I would like to try and sum up our experiences with the current release (I did not immediately realize that most of the discussions were going through the mailing list so I already created a related thread on the forum: https://trisquel.info/en/forum/about-libre-decentralized-independent-secure-and-authentication-friendly-platform-agnostic-m-0). This one focuses more specifically on using Jami on Trisquel 8.0.
I installed from the deb package provided here: https://dl.jami.net/ring-manual/ubuntu_16.04/jami-all_amd64.deb and tried IM and audio/video calls between my laptop (on a 50Mbps wired) and a recent Android device a few kilometers away on 4G. Everything worked fine: image and sound were sync, pictures uploaded quite fast and were nicely displayed within the discussion window, larger files would also transfer at a reasonable rate given the available bandwidth at both ends. The only shortcoming was the high latency due to network discovery on the DHT. However, I guess this can only improve in uptime. I noticed that username lookup gave fastest results at second trial. It might be of interest to note that anyone can send a text message to anyone else on the network through their user name. Also, except for those careful enough to hide it, user IPs are by default published on the DHT. Jami devs are not shy at all about the inner working of their soft but some non-technical summary about their implementation of OpenDHT might help the average user, and maybe the outliers too, understand what is going on in the background. (The person with whom I tested later gave it a try with a much more distant contact and told me that after installing on their respective WC they ran into major latency problems. The other end having a very low transfer rate, my guess is that network discovery simply took too long for sync to work. But it is only a guess and is off-topic here.) -- boba <[email protected]>
