Does anyone here use GNU Jami?

XMPP is absolutely the best option if you don't care about metadata protection.
- XMPP does video chat, or at least voice? What clients do you recommend? Linux, android, and iphone are all of interest. Thanks.
  
  On iPhone, I recommend Monal.
  
  Dino and Conversations. Some don't have OEMO so be careful. And yes it has video chat.
  
  How about Movim ?? It's an XMPP-Based Social-Media/Microblogging platform
- I care about many things related to encrypted real-time communication, including what security engineers recommend (since their judgements probably incorporate things I probably don't even know about or understand), so I don't think XMPP is the best option for me.
  https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/ https://soatok.blog/2024/07/31/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-signal-competitor/
  https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/

I use Jami and love it. If you want to use it on a de-googled phone you may not get live notifications though, which is annoying if you want to use it for calls. The simplest solution is to allow it to run in the background but it also allows you to use selfhosted push notifications which is cool. I just let it run an accept the hit to to my phone's battery. Jami is fairly easy to use and looks friendly too, which is helpful for getting non-technical friends to join you on it.
I struggled with Nextcloud Talk too.
Highly recommend Jami 👍
- Just so you know you can get push notifications on Jami. Jami has been supporting unified push notification for a while now, but it's opt-in, some might not opt for it considering reducing privacy a bit, as some actually disable the proxy and some phone specific feature intending to prevent battery exhausting too fast.
  For unified push support you can take a look at jami's article about its unified push support. I use ntfy BTW.
  
  But isn't UnifiedPush libre & privacy-respecting enough ?

I do !
works pretty well on both AOSP phones and gnu+linux desktops. Sad thing though is that I don't like using flatpak, and I prefer distro native built software, and on Artix/Arch, there are times where the version between the distro version is slightly outdated with regards to the mobile version, and that makes things not to work. This is mainly an issue ever since jami decided to stop supporting the gtk client on the desktop, to me the qt experience have been sad. Not sure if someone has forked the gtk client, that would be great.
So I'm using xmpp as my main messenger, and keep trying jami when it works.
I really like the p2p approach from jami, and also the way they care for those with no huge batteries phones, given they added support for unified push notifications, which can be of course avoided if required for extra privacy. Given my use case, I can't turn jami into my main messenger yet, but I keep trying, :) Meanwhile xmpp is there for me.
- You can install/update Jami from their official repository. The instructions are a bit buried on their website but they're there. I also avoid flatpak!
- Thanks, that is helpful. Have you tried building from source on the desktop? Right now I've only used the fdroid apk's. It works on one of my phones (Android 14) but not on the other (Android 7).
  
  Are you sure the phone it doesn't work on is older than android 7? According to its f-droid jami URL its latest version as well as two more also documented there, they all work on android 7 or later.
  I use LOS4uG, and I'm currently on android 14, so no need to build jami myself. Can you enable "unstable updates" on f-droid's "expert mode"? Perhaps then you get latest app, and that one works better. Otherwise you can report an issue to the android client, and perhaps you get guidance from them. You can also use their forum to ask questions. I have filed issues only so far.

Element is pretty good

I found it to be inconsistent about receiving messages on Android.
Having good luck with SimpleX at the moment.

I recommend Peer Calls as an alternative. Peer Calls uses peer-to-peer communication similar to Jami. You can check out Peer Calls on Github for more info.
So, in short, the things I really like about it:
Simple to selfhost - Only one Docker container with no dependencies (database, storage, etc.) and you only need to forward HTTP/S traffic.
Lightweight - You get voice and text chat; screen and file sharing. All of it directly P2P.
Private - Selfhosting the signaling server will grant you control over the only step which requires a central server during the WebRTC connection process.
No accounts - Just start using, no accounts are involved.

The only issue I have with GNU-Jami

is them checking for Unique Usernames

it's annoying & problematic
 
You have the DHT ("Distributed Hash-Table" based on Ethereum) & that should be enough
 
why even check for the uniqueness of the attached username ?
 
The DHT should be the ID & names need to be detachable from it
 
& we can't even edit the username once registered
Otherwise it's high-quality Libre/Free-Software but,

with room for improvements

I tried to use it, but I couldn't get it working (I couldn't receive any messages, and neither could my brother). In the end, I opted for Matrix instead.