Jami is p2p, it just cuts the middleman. Is it bad concept? I haven’t had the chance to test Jami or Signal, no adoption from my contacts. But, as from a federation and anti centralized services, Jami should be the better alternative, right?
I love Jami, that being said it has one massive problem. In order for it to be usable on local networks you need to either port forward the peer to peer port, set up a proxy relay or use the proxy relay that Jami provides. That’s not a big deal to set up or make any of those changes but they are things that need to be done. There is no real warning about it and when you are using mobile it works just fine due to cg-nat so the problem ends up seeming intermittent. Like I said I love Jami but I don’t think it will ever really be a contender for a mainstream chat platform unless they make some pretty big changes to how relays are handled or become more transparent about this particular problem in the setup process.
That being said… Matrix is pretty rad. Like really really rad. Go look at that. It feels a lot more like a federated chat service because it is designed from the ground up to be that. Plus interoperability with clients is cool. Plus if you set up your own server then you can add bridges to sync all of your accounts to use matrix so that you don’t have to force anyone to leave their respective platforms and you can have one unified repository for all of your messaging. Basically means you get to use what you want and other people can use what they want. Go look at it now. Go on git.
I’ve been using Telegram since I called it and left all Meta apps (about 4 years ago now). It has been a good experience since. Never heard of Jami but will look it up. =)
I liked Telegram at the start but they started doing crypto (I believe Signal does this too) and when I realize that default chat is not E2E encrypted (has to be secret chat) yet they advertise it as such. I also don’t like that you get greeted by paid features in different parts of the app (picking emoji and stickers). I’m fine with Telegram Premium but I hope they just hide the paid features rather than asking you to pay for the features across the app. Telegram’s UI/UX is way better than Signal and other messaging app which I like. Also, feature-wise they are ahead of the competition (even without premium). The fact that it’s one of the major communication outlet during Ukraine war is another issue plus. Privacy-wise, there are better options out there (Signal, Sessions, Briar, SimpleX (a new one), Element/Matrix). I still use it but not as much.