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 maintained an ejabberd server for myself and a few friends for many years. The config language was a little arcane to me at first, but it was pretty solid after I got it set up. I used a couple of different client apps with it over that time, most of which are still available on the F-droid repo. It was fun, but got annoying when the server needed maintenance, or was down, or because of any of the other minor nuisances that come along with maintaining a service for others to use.
Eventually we all ended up just moving over to Signal because it was just as good from the view of cost-benefit and risk for us. We’re just trading stupid memes and Saturday night stories among ourselves. The most radical thing we might organize is a trip to Vegas for the week.
Definitely try it out, but consider that being a comms provider for others is always a bigger chore than it seems at the outset.
I also had an ejabberd running for my family. Configured all the XEPs that take it into the current century. Had Conversations as a client for Android and Monal on iOS. No problems at all - apart from Monal being a bit wonky at times. But I assume these bugs are all fixed by now.
Also, Conversations is THE XMPP client. The guy behind it is involved in lots of XMPP stuff. And Monal tries to be the same for the iOS world.
But similarly, we all switched to Telegram over time as that’s where my parent’s friends are, too.
The most annoying thing about Signal is that they don’t for some reason allow registering from desktop directly, so I had to use signal-cli. Which is inconvenient AF and it’s a shame they haven’t added a feature as simple as “input an SMS code in the desktop client”.
Anyway, glad I only have to use it for a couple of guys and only with my real identity. So happy XMPP exists, and I have most of my 1-to-1 messaging with internet friends there. Very easy to host.
I hear you. The desktop wasn’t Signal’s primary market, and that’s pretty clear in their implementation. On the other hand, that difficulty registering a desktop servuce may make it less attractive to would-be bot farms and spammers. Its a thin one, but I see that as a silver lining.
Not just bot-farms and spammers, but just a regular person. What is Signal’s main feature? Encryption. You would not want to expose your sensitive chats to a smartphone, unless it has a privacy-respecting OS (which not all phones can do). Good thing I only have to use it with a couple of guys who don’t want to use other encrypted communication methods.
Did you ever get carbons working properly? (As in, mobile and desktop clients of the same user both getting messages and marking as read remotely between them)
Getting messages synced between modern clients works reliable since a long time.
Marking them as read on the other hand is not a feature of message carbons and there were different sometimes contradicting ways how that was implemented (it is a surprisingly complex topic).
That said, just a few weeks ago there has been a renewed effort to standartise message read synchronization and it looks like the major clients are on board this time, so I hope that will get much better soon.
No, we all only ever used single mobile clients. Sorry I can’t help
Sorry I should have said “carbons and carbons related qol extensions”
that is not carbons though, carbons is working properly. Apparently they talked about this issue in the latest XMPP group meetup so something may be in the works.
wow, that is so cool. A few weeka ago I talked about this with a server owner and he consulted a prodigy developer and told him what I said above. Amazing they got round to it so quickly. Thanks for the details.
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.
I am surprised that no one mentioned snikket yet, which is essentially a distribution of Prosody with sane defaults and a custom client.
Thanks, actually WeAreAllOne@lemm.ee mentioned it earlier lol. I’m planning to try this as I get a linux box running.
Many years ago I used XMPP with Prosody and it was ok.
- You can setup some retention time for attachments and history depending on the space you have.
- There are clients for multiple platforms but not very much advanced vs competition.
- Security is good with omemo protocol. In so e clients you have to turn it on since it’s not by default.
- Audio video calls on one to one is good as long as you setup stun coturn server. Android to iOS calls still in progress.
- Check out Snikket for an all in one solution.
You might want to also consider Matrix (dendrite option ?) for your needs.
I just started hosting Matrix in addition to XMPP (just because some communities prefer it now), and I find it bothersome that it saves chat history and media to every participating server. IDK how much of an issue chat logs would be, but media scares me a lot. Hopefully cleaning old files manually would not break anything…
Anyway, I started with Conduit rather than Dendrite, and it seems like a good experience. Could not even hope to get Synapse going on my weak VPS.
Ah good to know about Conduit!
Well that’s how the protocol works saving data on every participating server.
Simplex chat might be another alternative but is on early development as far as groups and desktop client.
Thanks. Have you tried configuring infinite time for retention/attachments/history? I can’t find a way to disable those limits completely. Conversations on Android and Pidgin on Linux/Windows look pretty good, I’ve yet to find a good OSX one though. I’ll try checking out Snikket, thanks.
Please don’t use Pidgin, its horribly outdated and doesn’t properly support nearly everything you want. For Windows Gajim is currently the best option, otherwise see: https://joinjabber.org
Unfortunately I don’t remember about the retention setting.
I would avoid Pidgin since I’m not so sure they implement fully omemo encryption. Try Gajim.
I would go with Prosody or Ejabberd, and here’s a good comparison: https://stackoverflow.com/a/45531372 and Ejabberd is the most used thing out there. https://xmpp.org/software/
Thanks. I’ll try Ejabberd as well :)
Yes, and this can be paired with a self-hosted mail server, too.
This is interesting. I’ve never heard of this project but it looks really neat.
We’ve been using it on our phones and desktops for three years now, it’s very stable
Do you self host your email or use it with an email provider? Also, does it need its own inbox/address to function? I can’t really tell from the documentation if it functions along side normal emails or if it’ll mess up your inbox if you use it with your normal inbox/address.
We use a self-hosted roundcube mail server, which is not necessary, and we did initially assign each person an additional account dedicated to delta.chat to prevent inbox clutter, but that didn’t happen.
Nowadays, we prefer to send and receive emails in delta.chat. One of my groups already has 70 members, contains a lot of images and PDFs, and it’s still very fluid to use.
We also run bots for integration with other systems, such as task management, meeting notifications, etc.
Awesome - thanks for the info!
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?
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.
It’s just a room for chatting among friends so not really, but I’ll check this out as well, thanks.
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.
What also bothers me is how prominent matrix.org instance is. So you got a system that is supposed to be decentralized… Yet defederating from the one central server would break a lot.
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
That’s just another detail where we see that.
Yes, but Matrix a plague of questionable open-source and a metadata disaster.
Matrix does not “leak” metadata. It HAS metadata.
Fair enough 😂😂😂
Does XMPP not have the same metadata?
No, or rather not quite. XMPP is designed on a need-to-see system where basically only the meta-data that a server or client really requires to function is shared with it. This can mean that there is quite a bit of meta-data shared with various servers in a popular group-chat, but that is rather the exception.
Matrix on the other hand is designed as a replicated data-store, meaning that really everything is shared with every connected server by design. The reason for this is so that chats can continue to function even when the original server is removed etc. This was the big original selling point of Matrix, but lately they have been somewhat quiet about it as it largely contradicts privacy concerns and might even be fundamentally GDPR incompatible. In any case it is pretty much a meta-data nightmare.
Well you also can’t remove shit on someone else’s email servers so is that not GDPR compatible?
In the case of email you have to actively send something to someone for it to be on their server. In Matrix it is sufficient for a 3rd party to join a chat for them to get the entire chat history (hopefully e2ee) including all meta-data back to the very first day the chat was created.
They’re actually working on that, which is nice. It’s called lazy loading I think? Not sure if it’s implemented yet.
No, that is only solving the problem of long loading times when first joining a chat (caused by the server having to download the entire chat history and meta-data). Eventually the server still has to synchronize the entire chat. There is no way around it by design.
Let me add the following: the problem is that that metadata is all over the place AND you can’t remove it from those 3rd party servers. Also there’s a ton of questionable stuff like read receipts and reactions that are never encrypted (not sure if this was fixed already). XMPP with OMEMO enables will encrypt everything.
Currently the OMEMO as implemented in most clients only encrypts message content, but not the meta-data. There is a newer, sadly incompatible version that encrypts more, but few XMPP clients support it (AFAIK only Kaidan and Moxxy).
About the metadata part: one of the issues with Matrix is that it considers some stuff like read receipts as metadata. In XMPP all that information is special messages inside your conversation thus they get encrypted as well.
You’re right that XMPP is federated as well and Matrix can be non-federated but I’ve heard some people had trouble with the Synapse server chugging resources despite not using federation.
I’ve been self-hosting Matrix Synapse for more than two years to chat friends and family and it has been rock-solid and it’s on a VPS that os hosting a Nextcloud and Lemmy instance as well. It is definitely not really resource hungry for small groups of people.
If you want to try again this route, just make sure that everybody saves a backup of their keys as the messages are all encrypted and while you can authenticate a new client installation from another client that the same user is logged in, some people - like my mother - only use one, on her phone, which is understandable.
So in summary, I’m very happy with it! :)
How much CPU, RAM and storage does it consume for you?
That is a good point… on average it’s around 500Mb of RAM usage, between 0.5% and 1% of CPU (it’s a 2.4Mhz four cores).
Space is 5Gb, mainly media files accumulated over two years.
So overall, not bad.
Tell them to fix it that shouldn’t happen.
Hands down Revolt. Best alternative I have found so far.
I’ve tried installing and using revolt. It’s okay and our members like it but the lack of support and a usable control panel makes it hard to choose.
Prosody can be configured to permanently save chat and files, you just need to change the default settings. If I remember correctly an empty value for the retention means infinite, but I don’t think that is a good idea as it just wastes storage space.
Otherwise I think you will run into issues with search as none of the xmpp clients consider permanent searchable history to be particularly important. And I tend to agree, as chat is among the worst possible ways to store information, no matter the search capabilities.
You’re right that it’s not ideal, but somehow people like it… :/
Thanks anyway, I’ll try if that works.
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.
‘Small’?
A lot of people (me included) host servers for a single person, lol. This is more than normal.
It seems they would like the flexibility to administrate the server any way which suits them. Using someone else’s server would complicate that, and expose their discussions to unknown administrators.
Those are just the things I can think of right off the bat.
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… :(
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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Which flavor of XMPP you tried?
As I mentioned in the OP I tried Prosody on my FreeBSD server, I’ve yet to get attachments working.
Oh sorry, misread exactly this part. I’ve had great experience with ejabberd, maybe worth trying it.
Signal is a good alternatives as you can group call and screen share (no audio), share images and videos etc. Messages are saved locally on devices unless a timer is set on the chat
Thanks, but it’s not ideal for our usage, it’s not selfhosted and there aren’t many clients available. Plus it doesn’t have unlimited message and attachments history.
