Just to start off, know that I have zero experience with this. I’m only looking into doing this because I’m absolutely sick and tired of centralised services (in this case Discord) turning to shit, and want to start a Discord-like/alternative federation between my friends.

Prosody seems to be the easiest to set up, and has all the available capabilities for a server that allows Discord-like functionality (text, group voicecall, streaming). Movim is the client that makes use of all that.

But I don’t have a clue how to set up a Prosody server with Podman. I’ve never done this before. I started by downloading the Prosody image through Podman, then tried running it, which prompted the creation of a container. Kept everything at the defaults and tried running it, but it didn’t work.

What do I do from here?

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    5·
    8 hours ago

    Movim specifically works a bit better with ejabberd, who also provide easy to use containers.

    Prosody is more of a Lego set to build your own server, so I don’t think they even provided official container images for a long time. There is https://snikket.org/ though which is an opinionated distribution of Prosody with easy to use containers. Sadly Snikket doesn’t play so well with Movim out of the box.

    In general it is probably easier to start out with a rented VPS. You can move to your own server later on when you got the basics down. Since XMPP servers are quite lightweight they run fine on low end VPS that can be rented for as little as 1€/month.

    • Tattorack@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      I have considered looking into renting a VPS, but considering my friends group does A LOT of voice calling and streaming over Discord I dint think super lightweight is an option. Even so, not having to pay for a server is always better than having to pay any amount for one.

      I’ll take a look at ejabberd. Didn’t know there were specific preferences for clients.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
        5·
        8 hours ago

        For now voice and video calls in xmpp only lightly touch the server and are mostly p2p. This comes with some scaling issues but for small groups of around 5 people it works fine.

        Movim is a bit special, for other clients it doesn’t matter much.