The average person isn’t going to delve into the nuance of open source project structure. If I wanted to support the jellyfin ecosystem, I would probably expect that donating to the jellyfin project is sufficient.

I haven’t tested it, but did you look at Damselfly? The documentation seems to suggest you can do it: https://github.com/Webreaper/Damselfly/blob/master/docs/Multi-user.md

https://damselfly.info/

Pretty sure I am running a j3455 with 12GB.

edit> Confirmed

opensuse aeon (Linux). Immutable and designed to just work and keep working. https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Aeon

I did back of the envelope math a while back where if active users of large self-hosted communities (such as /r/selfhosted) put $5/month into donations to the most used self-hosted software projects, ~20 projects could get ~$75,000/year of income. Not enough to build a company around, but enough to live well on in many parts of the world as a sole developer or enough for a maintainer to pay for other developer contribution.

I think the open source community fails to organize around the fact that development and maintenance isn’t free, but that as a massive user group, it takes minimal contribution from each to make an impact. Can better messaging and “structure” break the free rider problem?

Thanks for sharing. Anything in particular that was broken, or just a bad experience overall? I thought about spinning it up for family group video chats, but I guess I can cross that one off the list.

The 5 users will only talk to each other, or you have to connect out to the regular phone network? Group calls? Messaging? And when you say secure, do you mean end to end encrypted?

I don’t have experience using it, but it is worth looking at BigBlueButton.

Tumbleweed is generally the place to be. I think it is easier to target for packagers and is the basis for most of the interesting stuff going on in the distro. The immutable versions (now named Aeon and Kalpa) use something like a stripped down Tumbleweed at the core, with applications mostly containerized. Think tight rolling core that has strong automated tests and rather safe, with applications mostly isolated in Flatpak to prevent library conflicts and such.

Did you check the opensuse community repos? Search here: https://software.opensuse.org/ - lots of stuff that isn’t included in the core / official.

Nothing gets solved overnight. I realize that f-droid isn’t the be all end all, but hey, be the change you want to see in the world. Maybe Aurora is a stop-gap, but maximize your use of f-droid alternatives and support the developers however you can. Be active in alternatives to the big-tech sites, like posting in beehaw communities.

Poaching something I posted on Reddit /r/selfhosted at the beginning of the year:

Back of the envelope math. Assuming 30,000 active users here on /r/selfhosted x $50/yr = $1.5M / 20 -> $75,000 per year. In other words, if /r/selfhosted gave $50 per person per year, “we” could contribute $1.5M to open source projects we use. Some projects probably wouldn’t know what to do with resources and/or don’t have the infrastructure in place to receive anything, so not a panacea. But for the well organized and developed projects?

It’s sort of wild if you think about it. There are probably 10-12 very popular self-hosted applications with a very long tail, but 20-25 probably captures a very healthy cross section of use. Not every project or developer can accept monetary donations or use them effectively. But $75,000/year is median household income in the US.

There are almost certainly many more open source software and app users than there are self-hosted people - I’d imagine the self-host people are a subset. So what if we add open source software and mobile apps to the collective pool we could financially contribute to - again, $50/year/per able user - maybe the number of supportable applications goes up to 50 or 80.

Leading the thought experiment to a logical conclusion - if 80 open source projects received $75,000/year in donation income (at a minor cost to those able to pay and none to the vast majority), enough in most parts of the world to support a person and possibly a family, we would have more amazing, privacy respecting options. It doesn’t necessarily solve everything, most people naturally free-ride, and organizing many small contributions at a massive scale isn’t a solved problem itself. But, my point is that users collectively have way more power than we realize.

One other thing I forgot to mention - transparency of the lead developer and service provider is overlooked, imo, as a criteria for picking a secure messaging client. That background information on jami wasn’t terribly clear to me when I looked a couple of years ago; it does seem better now.

It is a nice p2p, e2ee messaging app/service that doesn’t use phone numbers, e-mail or other domain addresses as an identifier. I think it used to be GNU Ring, and can be used as a SIP client.

If it’s mostly about motion detection and false positives, it’s hard to avoid the object detection stuff if you aren’t doing that already. I stopped using Blue Iris before it started integrating object detection and I can’t speak to it at all. I liked the setup I had with ZoneMinder, Zoneminder Event Server, and the associated machine learning hooks, but the developer behind the event server and ML stuff left and it isn’t particularly well integrated. I like how quickly and comprehensively Viseron (https://github.com/roflcoopter/viseron) has progressed. Very sleek software, engaged developer, uses YOLOv7, and even supports an openvino backend. Well worth a look.

Blue Iris is terrific software. I’m curious though - what tended to go wrong with the alternatives?

I would note that ChromeOS is mainstream with normal users and it is effectively a well curated, highly-opinionated Linux distribution. Distros like opensuse Aeon and Kalpa, and Fedora Silverblue, are going from well established platforms into the highly curated, highly-opinionated direction as well. Limited set of options that work well out of the box not prone to breaking, and explicitly not for tinkerers. I tend to think that if Linux is ever going to reach mainstream users (outside of ChromeOS), it will be through these bulletproof, opinionated distros that put bubble wrap around the user.

I have a server at home, so this might not apply to you. But I used this software (https://github.com/bluenviron/mediamtx) to proxy the rtsp streams from cameras. It makes the streams available over multiple formats, so I stick the webrtc stream from the security cameras into a little, super simple html page I threw together. Bookmarked, on my android home screen, and I’m one click from seeing all of my cameras streaming while I’m on LAN.

Then I wrote a simple bash script to call ffmpeg to take a snapshot from each rtsp stream every x interval. I rewrote the landing page to show a table of those snapshots and each image is a hyperlink to the direct webrtc link to that camera’s stream. And the html page refreshes itself every x seconds.

I’m happy with this approach so far. The streams are now easily available on Android, Windows, Linux devices, no app beyond a web browser required.

What I plan to do next:

1. Make the web server and proxied streams available over my mesh VPN so that the landing page and cameras are available from outside the LAN.

2. Start throwing images at doods (https://github.com/snowzach/doods2) to identify objects, and pass the detection and image to a messenger like xmpp or matrix or telegram or even an irc channel to push an alert to me.

Omemo is double ratchet and my messages sync to multiple devices. New device can’t read old messages sent before exchanging keys with the other clients.

I use it for OMEMO encrypted family messaging and image transfer (snikket). Very fast messaging, lightweight server, and the A/V works quite well. Biggest issue, imo, is the lack of a great iOS client - not a judgement on the developers, I think that’s just the reality of developing on iOS. But an iOS client that works as seamlessly as Conversations would go a long way to regaining lost traction.