Tag Archives: self-hosting

Testing Galene videoconference server software

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During the Covid-19 pandemic Jitsi-Meet was one of the more popular software among some people for videoconference calls. However, Jitsi-Meet is not very secure. If people choose a very simple room name and no password then it can happen that suddenly strangers join your video call. Self-hosting and maintaining Jitsi-Meet is also not super easy.

Galene is different because it comes with the feature to create users, and users can have operate privileges to create invite links for other users. The invite links can be time limited.

I’ve tested self-hosting Galene and I was happy to see that it ran pretty well on moderate hardware (VPS with 1 GB RAM, with a swap file. Using Debian Linux as OS).

The question remains how many calls and users it can handle very well.

Galene has community provided packages for Yunohost, Arch Linux (AUR) and FreeBSD. A drawback of Galene is that it appears to be a one person project but there’s many one person projects and software can be forked when a project becomes dormant for some reason.

Off-topic : On the same VPS I’ve also installed Prosody with Yunohost and after getting the DNS settings right, as suggested by Yunohost, video-calls with Conversations IM app worked out of the box. Very cool! Thank you people at Yunohost!!! :)))

Part 2 – self-host – A video and audio calls alternative with XMPP/Jabber

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In the previous blog post (posted 6 January 2025) I’ve talked about the easiest way of having video- and audio-calls without self-hosting. In this post let’s look at one way to self-host an XMPP server for audio and video calls.

Warning : self-hosting services is not for the faint of heart. If you’ve never done this before, I’d suggest to first do some generic reading on self-hosting or maybe ask here or here.

The perhaps easiest way to self-host an XMPP server that can do video- and audio-calls is to use Snikket.

What is needed for this from you as the admin that will self-host ?

It’s been a while since I tested self-hosting Snikket but I remember that it was a matter of installing Snikket on a server, then log in to the web interface for the admin user, and then create invites for the users you want to have on-board.

After the user receives an invite they will be asked to install the Snikket app on their Android phone (The Snikket app is a soft-fork of the Conversations app. Note that -afair- installing the Snikket app is not a must. If you know your way around you can stick with the Conversations app) and continue to start using their Snikket user account on your server. And then starting an audio- or video call should be the same as in the previous blog post (posted 6 January 2025).

I’d also like to share some information for people with more experience with self-hosting. This could be difficult but perhaps not impossible 😉

Yunohost (link to their app catalog) is software made by a group of volunteers (Mainly in France it appears) that makes self-hosting easier. After a fresh installation you would be ready to install “apps” from the Yunohost apps catalog.

Some users have asked for the feature that the XMPP software that comes with Yunohost (Metronome) can also do video- and audio-calls. In this Github issue (from May 2020) some users claim that they got it working by changing some settings.

Note, if you scroll down to the last comment you can probably see that someone commented that Metronome has become an app instead of coming with a default Yunohost installation.

Happy chatting 🙂