Just because you define "decentralized" as strictly "peer-to-peer" doesn't mean everyone does.

Wikipedia literally uses the word "decentralized" to describe the Fediverse, which would seem to violate your personal definition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

> While a traditional social networking site will host all its content on servers owned by the parent company, the decentralized social media sites that make up the fediverse allow any individual or organization to host their own servers (referred to as an "instance").

>Wake me up when my teammates and I can message each other from our mobile devices without the involvement of any other computer...

Routers are computers. You'll be waiting a long time.

You already can, apart from some DHT and bootstrapping stuff.

https://tox.chat/

https://jami.net/

I tried to like Jami, but it never worked right when I tried it. I didn't find a decent Android Tox client with video call, but it should work alright for text.

Unfortunately we don't have any good clients for android that do videocalls properly(not even qtox on PC works that great). aTox is the only android client that was starting to get the proper features but the maintainer is busy with IRL stuff. You're right though, text and file transfers work pretty well and we are writing replacements for the existing code to make everything more reliable(and faster in the case of file transfers).

In a similar boat to you. Is there something out there that:

+ is committed to free software + respects the users + none of the poisonous big tech giant companies involved + is cross-platform + does text, calls, videocalls, file-transfers + can be set-up "normally" by non-technical friends and family + is ideally all the other good things: lightweight, smooth, decentralised, p2p, private, secure

I certainly couldn't find it. I've tried tox, jami, xmpp, irc, matrix, etc. There are things that can be set-up with some effort and messing with servers and verifying devices and so on, but not things you can talk your mother through during a phone call without a great threshold for annoyance (sorry Ma).

Signal maybe comes closest, and is what I use, but they have a few (big) issues too.

Any tip-offs greatly appreciated.

Signal… minus the phone number requirement and the primary Android/iOS device requirement and the NSA backdoor removed.

I would not recommend Tox anymore, as it is unmaintained - https://lists.tox.chat/pipermail/support/2023-August/000340....

It was a decent piece of tech, though!

I think that you're refering to qTox(which is currebtly not being maintained). Tox, the protocol, continues development as usual.

Really? I guess you guys are active elsewhere and not on the mailing lists, because those are as dead as a very dead thing. :)

Well, I don't know if anyone else responds to the mailing lists anymore to be honest. You can still get in touch through IRC though. We are on libera currently(and dogfooding tox groupchats). #tox for user related questions and #toktok for development.

Edit: Also, development is happening on github: https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore