There seem to be plentiful options for text chat servers, so I’m curious for those that self-host their own, what their preferences & experiences have been with them.
Also those mentioned in the title were just a few examples, if you run something else, e.g. Revolt or Mattermost or something else less popular, would be interested in reading about it!
XMPP with prosody is good once you’ve figured out the modules you need.
Unfortunately, I had to quit a few years back as there was no reliable iOS client. Long story short: notifications were never working as expected on that plateform.
Matrix.org is overkill for my needs, but at least notifications work accross the board 👍
Snikket.org is an xmmp server that bundles common extensions
I’ve been self-hosting Matrix for like 2+ years now. The setup yaml was a lot to get thru in terms of reading what each set of options did. That felt like a lot but the reality was only a few things actually needed to be set and/or changed to make it work the way I wanted. Thankfully Matrix documented all the options out.
Overall, I’m extremely happy with Matrix. It has very much been set it and forget it once it was up. I’m excited to see where Matrix 2.0 goes.
The new Element X is really awesome. Since it’s now in public beta I’m going to setup dendrite + mautrix-signal/-whatsapp/-discord behind their new matrix 2.0 sliding sync proxy.
The only thing I’m going to have to figure out is whether it’s possible to disable image compression for bridges, because the quality was pretty bad the last time I tried (not surprising after being compressed 3 times).
I grabbed Element X to try it out but my self host doesn’t support sliding sync. There is a sliding sync proxy docker that got put out to help but not sure I want to set that up if it will eventually get added to main. Might have to just wait. 😔
I’ll definitely set up the sliding sync proxy for the time being. It’s such a big improvement (after the initial sync) that I don’t want to wait for native support in conduit. Especially since conduit takes some time to support new features quickly.
How long did your initial sync take?
I’m not sure since it’s been a while since I tried it on my matrix.org account, but I’d say it took about as long as logging in on a new device.
Do you run it as a mostly isolated/self-contained instance, i.e. not federated/connected to others? I’ve read here & there that for some it seems to bog down as they try to operate it as a federated instance.
I run it with a whitelist of other instances I do federate with. I have actually been considering opening it up.
Matrix (synapse) + element-web works for me, although I didn’t get many people on board.
Mumble is what I use the most, with 2-10 users - it’s primarily for VoIP/gaming comms, but also has basic text chat. Text messages are not persistent though, and there is no web interface, only desktop/mobile clients.
For pragmatism, I just use Signal (not self-hosted) because it is at least partly FOSS, looks reasonably secure/private, and the UX is good enough so I could get people to use it.
I recommend checking out dendrite instead of synapse since it is more lightweight.
I have tried a few other matrix servers (dendrite and conduit), something always ended up not working because they don’t implement everything synapse (the reference server) does, or there were bugs - generally audio/video calling or file transfer would break. Synapse worked out of the box. It also has good documentation.
I don’t see any performance problems or abnormal resource usage with synapse either. As I said I don’t use it that much, so maybe there is something nasty I didn’t see yet. From what I’ve read, it is only a problem when you federate with “large” instances/rooms, but my server is not federated, it’s just a basic private chat server.
Yes, synapse performs and scales well at this point. They had to optimize it for the large scale deployments (e.g. government, health care). Dendrite and conduit need less ram after joining large rooms. Conduit even idles around 100MB if it’s only on few small rooms, which is pretty awesome.
I never actually used audio/video calling since I mainly use matrix for communities and sometimes bridging, so dendrite and even conduit worked well for me for a long time. Now that dendrite is baasically feature complete I’m curious when was the last time you used it? I remember having issues with bridges one or two years ago.
Now that dendrite is baasically feature complete I’m curious when was the last time you used it? I remember having issues with bridges one or two years ago.
About that time, yeah, ~1 year ago.
I needed a full replacement for RocketChat (ditched RC for many reasons, unaddressed security/privacy issues, painful and frequent major version upgrades, dependency on mongodb, corporate-driven development/removing security features from community edition, no lifecycle/EOL policy…) so I needed proper file upload/audio/video chat integration - Currently using the jitsi-meet integration, but might switch to element-call someday… In this regard my current setup appears to work well, so there’s no incentive to change…
I also wanted to set up a few bridges, started implementing the IRC bridge but didn’t go very far (tried going off the beaten path and making it work with podman, it might take a while). The steam chat bridge is also planned, but it doesn’t appear to be very well-maintained and I’m afraid it will break without warning, and the signal bridge which looks OK.
Currently I’m juggling between clients for all these different chat networks, feels like it’s 2002 again.
Ansible role to deploy/maintain Synapse + Element-web here if you’re interested.
Never change a running system :D
Thanks for the link to playbook. Since I only need a few bridges I just used docker compose and set the services up manually. I’m probably going to set it up with nixos at some point (though I’m gonna have to figure out how well an IPv6-only matrix server works, since my ISP took my v4 away on favor of ds-lite).
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According to this issue hcaptcha is not fixed yet.
And I just read the dendrite github page. The federation and client-server API’s are complete, but the AS API isn’t and things like SSO aren’t implemented.
[…] there are still some missing features (like SSO and Third-party ID APIs).
We are prioritising features that will benefit single-user homeservers first (e.g Receipts, E2E) rather than features that massive deployments may be interested in (OpenID, Guests, Admin APIs, AS API).
I recently started hosting XMPP with Prosody, and now try to get people besides my family there. Thought of Matrix but it seems to be the same thing but bloated. Most of my groupchat socialization is on IRC (I have a bouncer in the same place), but that’s not with people I know IRL.
Place where you have most of your friends…
Used to xmpp, but it died naturally over the time and someday I just stopped my prosody server. Nowadays - a bit of IRC (few friends still are there) and discord (not selfhosted, but from all the alternatives… feels best).
XMPP didn’t really die a natural death, it was kind of murdered. It’s still around though, and works great, but of course the problem is as you mentioned — your friends probably aren’t using it.
I mostly love discord. I wish it could be self hosted with federated identities, though.
Have you tried Revolt.chat?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the app only works with their hosted version, and I assume the selfhosted version doesn’t let you join different instances with the same account, right?
Basically, there’s no point in going to something I won’t be able to convince my friends to be on.
AFAIK, It has a Discord bridge. So friends using discord will be able to interact with you on your server. You can selfhost, accounts aren’t federated (like Lemmy), posts aren’t federated on other servers (unlike Lemmy).
Innnteresting. Thank you; I will check that out.
I used Mattermost for a community project, but had trouble getting people to install/use/learn yet another client.
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