Chat

Alternatives

If Rocket.chat turns out to be troublesome, we could try discord instead. https://discordapp.com/open-source

Some other possibilities to enable video chat in browsers... This may be simpler and people may be more likely to use it, but it would have to work, and many I have read about seem really clunky and bad!

https://github.com/trailofbits/tubertc

oro chat

Tiny chat might be useful, seems simple but not independent

and this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieBtXwHvoNk

matrix is a completely decentralized system for fully distributed chat rooms with no single points of control or failure. But it is not really ready yet.

Tried iflychat.com but can't set up an account because of stupid useless google captcha. Will try again later because the video chat is confirmed as p2p and available in the free version. Also wp plug-in.

What we need:

• Comms for Direct Sponsor recipients to communicate with each other
• for recipients and sponsors to communicate
• for clickforafrica users to share links and advice as well as general community discussion
• A reliable way to communicate with new users (most never get the email replies I send out, especially volunteer devs!). Instead of the contact form, send them to the chat site.
• Video conferencing for all, but especially so we can do good podcasts
• Support channels for users of all sites.

Commercial apps with the facilities we need would cost at least $100 per month (e.g. rocketchatlauncher or rocketchat cloud). We need to keep running costs as close to zero as possible to avoid becoming a bureaucracy.

Rocket.Chat looks exactly like Slack and has the same functions, text, audio and video chat, including conferencing - channels, notifications and much more.

There's a demo chat you can join here.

chat.clickforafrica.org is our test installation.

Though it is a stand-alone server and not part of any site, it can add a live chat feature to the websites.

More search reveals that it is indeed P2P in the video chats and audio, so no worries about bandwidth-hogging the server. There is a WebRTC Troubleshooter we can use too. Seems like there can be problems if participants are remote from each other, or in a group chat, but there is a solution in jitsi, which is apparently integrated already and easy to activate. It sounds like the video streams are still peer-to-peer although I have not seen or heard it said explicitly (in English at least!).