Just to start off, know that I have zero experience with this. I’m only looking into doing this because I’m absolutely sick and tired of centralised services (in this case Discord) turning to shit, and want to start a Discord-like/alternative federation between my friends.
Prosody seems to be the easiest to set up, and has all the available capabilities for a server that allows Discord-like functionality (text, group voicecall, streaming). Movim is the client that makes use of all that.
But I don’t have a clue how to set up a Prosody server with Podman. I’ve never done this before. I started by downloading the Prosody image through Podman, then tried running it, which prompted the creation of a container. Kept everything at the defaults and tried running it, but it didn’t work.
What do I do from here?
You can try Snikket.org, which is basically Prosody but easier. But you can’t selfhost “on each person’s own computers” as you said because you’d still need a publicly exposable IP addresses and high uptime. Maybe you could try registering on an XMPP or Matrix instance you like and migrate your community over there first
Question for others: is Prosody’s (and XMPP’s) group calls really good? I’m under the impression that Matrix (with Element Call) is currently better due to the SFU architecture, but I’d be happy to be proven otherwise. I’m interested to hear required specs, how large the calls can be, and how much strain it puts on the TURN server and clients especially when it comes to multiparty streaming
AFAIK the Movim people are working on SFU calls too, but not soon
Maybe. Looking like the best option right now.
Yes, Matrix is a bit ahead with SFU calls (after depending on Jitsi Meet for a long time, which uses xmpp under the hood). But for most usecases it doesn’t matter so much. On a modern internet connection a SFU basically only starts being useful in calls with ten or more participants. For corporate board meeting calls maybe, but your family call is also fine without.