RPDeshaies
commented
2 years ago Hi! Thanks for opening this.
Fari App is a front-end only single page application and the only "back-end" part is Liveblock's server and this code is private to their organization.
As not many people would use such a framework, and because it was very unreliable for a lot of users when I used P2P features in the app, I don't have plans to support it again.
And yeah, as far as I know, there are no ways to host your own liveblock server, though this is something you could bring up with them.
Sorry about this, but I do plan on continuing to support the development of Fari App for years to come, and the people at Liveblocks are friends and old colleagues of mine, so I do personally trust their service. If that means anything ^^
🚩 Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe
I would like to avoid sending my role-playing through third-party servers. As I currently understand it, most communication goes through Liveblock's wss://api.liveblocks.io.
✅ Describe the solution you'd like
I would like to be able to use my own server instead of https://fari.app and wss://api.liveblocks.io.
✏️ Describe alternatives you've considered
I thought about self hosting a Liveblocks instance, but I could not find their server sources. I suspect only their client libraries are free, their server software proprietary? The parameter to set the server URL also does not seem to be documented, so this might end up somewhat hacky.
I read that you had troubles with the reliability of the previously used peer-to-peer system which made you adopt the ready-made Liveblocks solution. So I do understand if this is not a use-case you want to support (also see #67), maybe I should just increase my tolerance of third-party services, or move to another VTT. I did really enjoy Fari App though, so I first wanted to make sure that this is indeed the case.
📄 Additional context
I have been self-hosting an instance of Fari App for some time now, replacing references to Discord etc. with links to the official https://fari.app (in general adapting texts to make sure you get all the credit but none of the responsibility for my instance) and disabling Google Analytics. I did not yet replace the PeerJS rendezvous server with my own, but planned on doing that at some point and felt secure, knowing both Fari App and the PeerJS server to be open source. When reading about the new «cloud based infrastucture» in the v6.0.0 changelog, I stopped upgrading my instance (we were currently not using it anyways) until I found some time to investigate my options of self-hosting Liveblocks.
Anyways, thank you very much for Fari App. It has been a great fit for the campaigns I played on it, and will probably continue to bring much joy to many people, even if this issue ends up not being solved.