Hi. I have a group of 6 people using Discord to chat. Recently Discord changed a lot and we’re looking for an alternative. We have a few requirements:
- Good client on multiple platforms
- Easy to use search
- Self hosted
- Permanently saved chat history & attachments on server (no expiration)
- Easy image upload (Ctrl+V to post image from clipboard)
IRC isn’t an option as chat history is saved on the client, and there’s no good integrated way to share files and preview images. Matrix would be an overkill as we’re a small group not interested in federation, and the available clients had a few bugs. Mattermost lacks a good mobile app (their current one had bunch of bugs). XMPP appears to be the best as it is extensible and has many clients available.
However, I tried configuring prosody on my FreeBSD server and it seems like it doesn’t permanently save chat history or attachment files. Does anyone know if these can be solved? Or is there any better alternative than XMPP?
Thanks.
I am surprised that no one mentioned snikket yet, which is essentially a distribution of Prosody with sane defaults and a custom client.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
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You can have non-federated Matrix. And XMPP is federated as well.
XMPP is probably fine. I haven’t used it but people say it’s good.
Yes, but Matrix a plague of questionable open-source and a metadata disaster.
Matrix’s E2EE does not, however, encrypt everything. The following information is not encrypted: Message senders, Session/device IDs, Message timestamps, Room members (join/leave/invite events), Message edit events, Message reactions, Read receipts, Nicknames, Profile pictures
Matrix is developed by a for profit entity, a group of venture capitalists and having a spec doesn’t mean everything. The way Matrix is designed is to force people into jumping through hoops and kind of drawing all attention to Matrix itself instead of the end result.
Decentralized communication protocol Matrix shifts to less-permissive AGPL open source license Element, the company and core developer behind the decentralized communication protocol known as Matrix, has announced a notable license change that will make the open source project just that little bit less appealing for companies looking to build on top of it.
Stop recommending questionable open-source like Matrix. XMPP is the true and the OG federated and truly open solution that is very extensible. XMPP is tested, reliable, secure and above all a truly open standard and decentralized it just lacks some investment in better mobile clients.
What people fail to see is that XMPP is the only solution that treats messaging and video like email: just provide an address and the servers and clients will cooperate with each other in order to maintain a conversation and it can be configured to be secure and private. Everything else is just an attempt at yet another vendor lock-in. Here a quick overview of the architecture.
Yes, but Matrix a plague of questionable open-source and a metadata disaster.
Matrix does not “leak” metadata. It HAS metadata.
You all are welcome at DumbDevices XMPP. You can create an account with conversations app.
Looks great. Though we’d prefer selfhosting as of now. Thanks for the info.
For 6 people, why do you want to host a server? You can use any service for now.
I get what you’re saying, but this feels like a weird question to ask in a community for selfhosting enthusiasts.
I host an XMPP server. I did it as there is none here in Bharat. It is not worth hosting for 6 people.
Only a small set of users is all the more reason to self-host, in my opinion.
A lot of people (me included) host servers for a single person, lol. This is more than normal.
Prosody claims to support Message Archive Management and HTTP file sharing, sounds like the feature you want, or at least it is close.
Yeah it seems to have bunch of plugins but it’s not working well for some reason… :(
Nextcloud has chat capabilities. Perhaps it might be overkill for chat alone but presumably you also want some collaboration with documents.
Yes, but Nextcloud is also a perpetually half made project that breaks at every corner and requires a lot of resources.
Speaking from experience from the last five years, it’s been pretty good for me.
Looks interesting, but isn’t this slow though?
Our chatroom is very active and the members won’t move if it’s much slower compared to Discord unfortunately…
It’s basically real-time, even sending large files is very fast, I don’t know the details of the reason, maybe it’s because there is not much difference between IMAP and TLS, or because the roundcube we deploy is super fast?
You don’t have to federate with matrix.
Curious: what are the bugs you encountered? I guess you looked deeper into element (or schildichat). The next version is on its way but not yet ready for prime time. In the long run it’ll be your best bet.
One of the members and I used to chat on Matrix some time ago. I didn’t encounter much issues but he had an awful experience (android/Windows, encryption related things and minor glitches on the client such as when syncing) that he refuses to move to Matrix unfortunately…
Understand the issue. I know those bugs. Those were funny times. That didn’t happen in a long time
Happened to me yesterday on the official element webclient 🤷♂️ These are far from solved.
