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.

  • DranEnglish
    2•7 months ago

    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)

    • poVoqEnglish
      2•7 months ago

      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.

      • DranEnglish
        1•7 months ago

        Sorry I should have said “carbons and carbons related qol extensions”

      • SolidGrueEnglish
        1•7 months ago

        No, we all only ever used single mobile clients. Sorry I can’t help

    • BrunachoEnglish
      2•7 months ago

      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.