XMPP as a Discord alternative for small group?

hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 76 points –

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.

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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.

I get what you're saying, but this feels like a weird question to ask in a community for selfhosting enthusiasts.

I host an XMPP server. I did it as there is none here in Bharat. It is not worth hosting for 6 people.

A lot of people (me included) host servers for a single person, lol. This is more than normal.

It seems they would like the flexibility to administrate the server any way which suits them. Using someone else’s server would complicate that, and expose their discussions to unknown administrators.

Those are just the things I can think of right off the bat.