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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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XMPP as a Discord alternative for small group? (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

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.