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.

  • Kairos@lemmy.todayEnglish
    51·
    6 months ago

    You can have non-federated Matrix. And XMPP is federated as well.

    XMPP is probably fine. I haven’t used it but people say it’s good.

    • hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.orgOPEnglish
      3·
      6 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 Prenna@lemmy.stefanoprenna.comEnglish
        52·
        6 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 Prenna@lemmy.stefanoprenna.comEnglish
            4·
            6 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.

      • EngineerGaming@feddit.nlEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        What also bothers me is how prominent matrix.org instance is. So you got a system that is supposed to be decentralized… Yet defederating from the one central server would break a lot.

      • Kairos@lemmy.todayEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        Yes, but Matrix a plague of questionable open-source and a metadata disaster.

        Matrix does not “leak” metadata. It HAS metadata.

        • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
          41·
          6 months ago

          No, or rather not quite. XMPP is designed on a need-to-see system where basically only the meta-data that a server or client really requires to function is shared with it. This can mean that there is quite a bit of meta-data shared with various servers in a popular group-chat, but that is rather the exception.

          Matrix on the other hand is designed as a replicated data-store, meaning that really everything is shared with every connected server by design. The reason for this is so that chats can continue to function even when the original server is removed etc. This was the big original selling point of Matrix, but lately they have been somewhat quiet about it as it largely contradicts privacy concerns and might even be fundamentally GDPR incompatible. In any case it is pretty much a meta-data nightmare.

          • Kairos@lemmy.todayEnglish
            1·
            6 months ago

            Well you also can’t remove shit on someone else’s email servers so is that not GDPR compatible?

            • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
              4·
              6 months ago

              In the case of email you have to actively send something to someone for it to be on their server. In Matrix it is sufficient for a 3rd party to join a chat for them to get the entire chat history (hopefully e2ee) including all meta-data back to the very first day the chat was created.

              • Kairos@lemmy.todayEnglish
                1·
                6 months ago

                They’re actually working on that, which is nice. It’s called lazy loading I think? Not sure if it’s implemented yet.

                • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
                  3·
                  6 months ago

                  No, that is only solving the problem of long loading times when first joining a chat (caused by the server having to download the entire chat history and meta-data). Eventually the server still has to synchronize the entire chat. There is no way around it by design.

            • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
              2·
              6 months ago

              Currently the OMEMO as implemented in most clients only encrypts message content, but not the meta-data. There is a newer, sadly incompatible version that encrypts more, but few XMPP clients support it (AFAIK only Kaidan and Moxxy).