Ive been using Jami for a couple of weeks and i’m generally impressed by how well it works and have been thinking about moving some organizational communication infrastructure over to Jami for calls and less official chit chatting.
A big part of that would be group chats aka swarms that, to my understanding, have not yet been implemented in the official release we’re using (Version: 202110012037). Ive read the documentation on swarms and have some general questions:
given the nature of the system can there be “privileged” users? moderation? can a malicious user be removed? if yes, by whom?
i guess what i’m trying to get at is if “swarms” could work something like a distributed Telegram channel? i’ve been looking for something like this for a while and Jami’s implementation using Git sounds a lot more reasonable then some of the Blockchain “crypto” versions whitepapers on distributed group chats i’ve seen on this matter.
First note: Swarm UI is indeed not implemented. However, the API is usable and a lot of group chat (except calls mainly) is already here and usable via the API (and GitHub - AmarOk1412/jami-cli: Jami client for terminal use it)
given the nature of the system can there be “privileged” users?
Yes, there is admins, and normal users for now. In the future, there will be several levels with different permissions. For now, we only have one mode for swarm (private with invite), but generating invites, kicking etc will be configurable in the long term.
can a malicious user be removed?
Yes admins can kick someone. via the API “removeConversationMember”
However, kicking a member from a distributed group is quite complex. Because some parts can continue to live (internet shutdown splitting the swarm in 2 parts for example) and interact with each other, the kick system is a bit different from classic centralized things. A consensus between all the admins must be realized before actually kicking someone to avoid splits. If there is only one admin it’s not a problem. For multiple admins, it’s via a vote system (for more details and use case: https://git.jami.net/savoirfairelinux/jami-project/-/wikis/technical/2.3.-Swarm#remove-a-device-from-a-conversation)
i guess what i’m trying to get at is if “swarms” could work something like a distributed Telegram channel?
Well, it gets hot. In some places in europe is the discussion to block Telegram. This swarm function really is needed now for citzens to be able to organize.