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.
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…
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?
This is interesting. I’ve never heard of this project but it looks really neat.
We’ve been using it on our phones and desktops for three years now, it’s very stable
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.
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.
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.
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.
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! :)
How much CPU, RAM and storage does it consume for you?
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.
