Federated real-time communication using open protocols is possible and valuable.

To deliver a simple mechanism to deliver a system that implements federated real-time communication using open protocols.

Whatsapp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, and others are heavily used nowadays for real-time communication (instant messaging, audio, video). All are under control of private companies.

Email is a federated, non-real-time, communication using open protocols. You can own your email address (by owning a domain name), and run your own service or use an email provider. You can transfer your data between different providers.

The same experience should be possible for real-time communications.

See DEPLOYING.md.

All FRTCUOP assets are in the public domain.

FRTCUOP is based in existing open source projects.

• XMPP server deployment, usable by the Conversations XMPP client, with the following features:
  • Instant messaging
  • Group messaging
  • Audio/video calls
  • Federation
  • Modern experience (push notifications, low battery usage, delivery/read receipts, inline multimedia, multiple device synchronization, etc.)
• Monitoring
• Compatible with Movim servers (tested with https://chatterboxtown.us/)
• Automatic updates
• Backup/restore, allowing the entire state of the FRTCUOP system to be stored in a directory, and restoring an FRTCUOP system from such directory

• Web client for XMPP server, with the following features:
  • Instant messaging
  • Group messaging
  • Audio/video calls
  • Federation

• XMPP (Jingle)/SIP gateway, allowing the XMPP server to interoperate with an external SIP provider (for interoperation with hardware SIP phones and the PSTN)

• Room conference system ("TV mode", or using existing solutions)

• LDAP interoperation, allowing FRTCUOP to use an external LDAP server as an authentication and directory source

Those features are not part of the roadmap right now:

• Text/voice/video conference rooms
• Guest browser access (URLs to message/call an internal user, and join conference rooms)
• Call/conference recording
• Real-time transcription
• Internal PBX
• Whitelabelling/reselling/multitenancy/billing
• Bridging to additional services
• Clustering/high availability
• End-to-end encryption
• Accessibility
• Real-time location sharing (Conversations does not support this directly. You can use Google Maps to share your location- it provides a URL you can share through XMPP)

However, the project could benefit from those features and would initially consider contributions to the project in those areas.