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.

  • @[email protected]OPEnglish
    3•7 months ago

    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.

    • Stefano PrennaEnglish
      4•7 months ago

      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! :)

        • Stefano PrennaEnglish
          4•7 months ago

          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.

    • KairosEnglish
      1•7 months ago

      Tell them to fix it that shouldn’t happen.