9mo ago

XMPP as a Discord alternative for small group?

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.

80 comments

You don't have to federate with matrix.
Curious: what are the bugs you encountered? I guess you looked deeper into element (or schildichat). The next version is on its way but not yet ready for prime time. In the long run it'll be your best bet.
- One of the members and I used to chat on Matrix some time ago. I didn't encounter much issues but he had an awful experience (android/Windows, encryption related things and minor glitches on the client such as when syncing) that he refuses to move to Matrix unfortunately...
  
  Understand the issue. I know those bugs. Those were funny times. That didn't happen in a long time

I maintained an ejabberd server for myself and a few friends for many years. The config language was a little arcane to me at first, but it was pretty solid after I got it set up. I used a couple of different client apps with it over that time, most of which are still available on the F-droid repo. It was fun, but got annoying when the server needed maintenance, or was down, or because of any of the other minor nuisances that come along with maintaining a service for others to use.
Eventually we all ended up just moving over to Signal because it was just as good from the view of cost-benefit and risk for us. We're just trading stupid memes and Saturday night stories among ourselves. The most radical thing we might organize is a trip to Vegas for the week.
Definitely try it out, but consider that being a comms provider for others is always a bigger chore than it seems at the outset.
- I also had an ejabberd running for my family. Configured all the XEPs that take it into the current century. Had Conversations as a client for Android and Monal on iOS. No problems at all - apart from Monal being a bit wonky at times. But I assume these bugs are all fixed by now.
  Also, Conversations is THE XMPP client. The guy behind it is involved in lots of XMPP stuff. And Monal tries to be the same for the iOS world.
  But similarly, we all switched to Telegram over time as that's where my parent's friends are, too.
- The most annoying thing about Signal is that they don't for some reason allow registering from desktop directly, so I had to use signal-cli. Which is inconvenient AF and it's a shame they haven't added a feature as simple as "input an SMS code in the desktop client".
  Anyway, glad I only have to use it for a couple of guys and only with my real identity. So happy XMPP exists, and I have most of my 1-to-1 messaging with internet friends there. Very easy to host.
  
  I hear you. The desktop wasn't Signal's primary market, and that's pretty clear in their implementation. On the other hand, that difficulty registering a desktop servuce may make it less attractive to would-be bot farms and spammers. Its a thin one, but I see that as a silver lining.
- Did you ever get carbons working properly? (As in, mobile and desktop clients of the same user both getting messages and marking as read remotely between them)
  
  that is not carbons though, carbons is working properly. Apparently they talked about this issue in the latest XMPP group meetup so something may be in the works.
  
  Getting messages synced between modern clients works reliable since a long time.
  Marking them as read on the other hand is not a feature of message carbons and there were different sometimes contradicting ways how that was implemented (it is a surprisingly complex topic).
  That said, just a few weeks ago there has been a renewed effort to standartise message read synchronization and it looks like the major clients are on board this time, so I hope that will get much better soon.

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.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  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
  
  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.

I am surprised that no one mentioned snikket yet, which is essentially a distribution of Prosody with sane defaults and a custom client.
- Thanks, actually WeAreAllOne@lemm.ee mentioned it earlier lol. I'm planning to try this as I get a linux box running.

I would go with Prosody or Ejabberd, and here's a good comparison: https://stackoverflow.com/a/45531372 and Ejabberd is the most used thing out there. https://xmpp.org/software/
- Thanks. I'll try Ejabberd as well :)

delta.chat
- Yes, and this can be paired with a self-hosted mail server, too.
- 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
- 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?

Nextcloud has chat capabilities. Perhaps it might be overkill for chat alone but presumably you also want some collaboration with documents.
- Yes, but Nextcloud is also a perpetually half made project that breaks at every corner and requires a lot of resources.
  
  Speaking from experience from the last five years, it's been pretty good for me.
- It's just a room for chatting among friends so not really, but I'll check this out as well, thanks.

Hands down Revolt. Best alternative I have found so far.
- I've tried installing and using revolt. It's okay and our members like it but the lack of support and a usable control panel makes it hard to choose.

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.
- Yes, but Matrix a plague of questionable open-source and a metadata disaster.
  Matrix’s E2EE does not, however, encrypt everything. The following information is not encrypted: Message senders, Session/device IDs, Message timestamps, Room members (join/leave/invite events), Message edit events, Message reactions, Read receipts, Nicknames, Profile pictures
  Matrix is developed by a for profit entity, a group of venture capitalists and having a spec doesn’t mean everything. The way Matrix is designed is to force people into jumping through hoops and kind of drawing all attention to Matrix itself instead of the end result.
  Decentralized communication protocol Matrix shifts to less-permissive AGPL open source license Element, the company and core developer behind the decentralized communication protocol known as Matrix, has announced a notable license change that will make the open source project just that little bit less appealing for companies looking to build on top of it.
  https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/06/decentralized-communication-protocol-matrix-shifts-to-less-permissive-agpl-open-source-license/
  Stop recommending questionable open-source like Matrix. XMPP is the true and the OG federated and truly open solution that is very extensible. XMPP is tested, reliable, secure and above all a truly open standard and decentralized it just lacks some investment in better mobile clients.
  What people fail to see is that XMPP is the only solution that treats messaging and video like email: just provide an address and the servers and clients will cooperate with each other in order to maintain a conversation and it can be configured to be secure and private. Everything else is just an attempt at yet another vendor lock-in. Here a quick overview of the architecture.
  
  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.
  
  Yes, but Matrix a plague of questionable open-source and a metadata disaster.
  Matrix does not "leak" metadata. It HAS metadata.
  
  Does XMPP not have the same metadata?
- 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! :)
  
  Tell them to fix it that shouldn't happen.

Prosody can be configured to permanently save chat and files, you just need to change the default settings. If I remember correctly an empty value for the retention means infinite, but I don't think that is a good idea as it just wastes storage space.
Otherwise I think you will run into issues with search as none of the xmpp clients consider permanent searchable history to be particularly important. And I tend to agree, as chat is among the worst possible ways to store information, no matter the search capabilities.
- You're right that it's not ideal, but somehow people like it... :/
  Thanks anyway, I'll try if that works.

You all are welcome at DumbDevices XMPP. You can create an account with conversations app.
- Looks great. Though we'd prefer selfhosting as of now. Thanks for the info.
  
  For 6 people, why do you want to host a server? You can use any service for now.

Which flavor of XMPP you tried?
- As I mentioned in the OP I tried Prosody on my FreeBSD server, I've yet to get attachments working.
  
  Oh sorry, misread exactly this part. I've had great experience with ejabberd, maybe worth trying it.

Prosody claims to support Message Archive Management and HTTP file sharing, sounds like the feature you want, or at least it is close.
- Yeah it seems to have bunch of plugins but it's not working well for some reason.. :(

Signal is a good alternatives as you can group call and screen share (no audio), share images and videos etc. Messages are saved locally on devices unless a timer is set on the chat
- Thanks, but it's not ideal for our usage, it's not selfhosted and there aren't many clients available. Plus it doesn't have unlimited message and attachments history.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
IMAP	Internet Message Access Protocol for email
SSL	Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
TLS	Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

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80 comments