At the very heart of winter, the Jami team has the pleasure to present you Világfa, the new version of Jami.

Let's put aside the countless bug fixes and improvements of the existing features to focus on the most important innovation of this version: group swarms.

Introducing Swarm for small groups

Last year we introduced swarms for one-to-one conversations. Since then, it allows users to synchronize a conversation across all their devices. However, this is only a small part Swarms allow us to do. The main goal of this technology is to allow us to have conversations with multiple participants.
For some months now, we are slowly making conversations with small groups (8 people) available on all platforms, and in this article, we will describe this new feature.

What's new

Create conversation

Clients have a new button allowing users to create conversations. The profile of the conversation can be customized and it can be a conversation with 8 members.

Adding and removing members

Once the swarm is created, it's possible to add and remove members from it (or leave it). Every member is able to invite other people, however, only the administrator is able to remove members from the group.

For now, members can have three differents levels:

• Invited: when the user is added, but has not joined yet
• Member: once the person joined the conversation
• Administrator: this member can modify the profile and kick members.

A new details panel

In every conversation, a new panel was introduced. This panel contains all information about the conversation such as the members, documents sent into this conversation and preferences.

Updated features

One to One conversations already got a lot of features and some of them were updated to work in conversations with multiple members

Multiple read status and typing status

File transfer

If a file is transmitted in a conversation. Any member who has the file can send it. This allows participants to receive files even if the original sender is not online.

And a lot more, like location sharing, searching messages in the conversation, emoji reactions…

Future

Even if it's a big step for Jami, the technology will continue to evolve a lot in the following months. These are some of the next big steps:

1. Calls: Even if users already have the possibility to create a video conference, there is no common message history during this call. So we want to add the ability to create conversations with multiple members. This will change a lot of things for call management because you do not call a group like you call one person. This feature is already available as an experimental feature in the Desktop client and will be described in the next article.
2. Preferences: We introduced some preferences for the conversation such as changing the conversation's color, ignoring the notifications, and changing the profile, but more preferences will come.
3. Increasing the size of the groups: 8 people can handle a lot of use cases, but it is still a small number. Our current focus is to remove this limitation of 8 people.
4. Visibility: Jami only supports private conversations with 8 people, but in the future, we can imagine public swarms.
5. Permission levels: For now, there is only one administrator, but we plan to support multiple administrators and multiple levels of permission.

By Sébastien Blin, Andreas Traczyk