this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
156 points (97.6% liked)

Selfhosted

37827 readers
587 users here now

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.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm looking into hosting one of these for the first time. From my limited research, XMPP seems to win in every way, which makes me think I must be missing something. Matrix is almost always mentioned as the de-facto standard, but I rarely saw arguments why it is better than XMPP?

Xmpp seems way easier to host, requiring less resources, has many more options for clients, and is simpler and thus easier to manage and reason about when something goes wrong.

So what's the deal?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

But at least I can tell non-technical people to download Element from the App stores and they will have a consistently-not-great-but-acceptable-and-improving experience.

Conversations on Android looks and feels like any other modern messenger and supports basically all the XMPP features there are. And I found Monal on iOS to be pretty usable as well, when I tested it 3 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yes, Monal is catching up to Siskin fast, but until recently didn't support a/v calls which is why many people still prefer Siskin.

As for a unified system, have a look at https://snikket.org which offers a one-stop solution under a single brand similar to Element. It uses lightly modified versions of Conversations, Siskin and Prosody (as a server) under the hood.

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

Conversations on Android seems to be the default answer for "advanced client".

But for everything else... look at Monal's blog, they only added support to audio calls in October of last year. Nice to see it's still being developed, but "too little, too late" seems fair.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

The other XMPP client for iOS called Siskin has had a/v calls for many years now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Yeah, I mentioned it in the first comment. But seriously, it looks like something built in 2009. It might be functional, but only a die-hard XMPP fan would be interested in using it.