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.

    • grayEnglish
      4•8 months ago

      This is interesting. I’ve never heard of this project but it looks really neat.

      • bobEnglish
        3•8 months ago

        We’ve been using it on our phones and desktops for three years now, it’s very stable

        • grayEnglish
          1•8 months ago

          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.

          • bobEnglish
            4•8 months ago

            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.

            • grayEnglish
              3•8 months ago

              Awesome - thanks for the info!

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      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…

      • bobEnglish
        2•8 months ago

        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?