5
What are their complaints about Mattermost? That might help.
@a @selfhosted @selfhostedchat Mattermost seems to be gradually enshittifying but it's (IMO) the best so far.
(Though I'm running my instance on EC2 right now. Moving to my home server once my RIs expire.)
Signal
Yeah, for chat I've tried a few systems but honestly I already had signal, they understand that signal chats aren't texting, the privacy is important to me, and most of all... why rock the boat?
It's not self-hosted yeah yeah but not everything needs to be. Password management, todo lists, calendar and contacts, grocery lists... sure yeah. But nothing for chat really struck me. And I don't want to teach everyone how it works just to test a 'maybe' alternative.
I use a self hosted XMPP stack with ejabberd as server and conversations.im for mobile apps. I have audio and video calls and tons of features built into xmpp. There is a huge selection of apps for all platforms.
XMPP is a battle tested protocol that all major messaging apps use underneath.
I used Matrix a few years ago for a full year. I dropped it and never came back. It is a bloated solution to a problem that was already solved by xmpp.
I programmed a bot that is shared with a private room that provides commands such as archiving websites with archiveit or yt videos with TubeArchivist
I am planning however to migrate from Ejabberd to Prosody as I would like to easilly hack on the source code or extensions and Ejabberd is Erlang with a very rigid stack.
Doesn't xmpp require a constant connection?
I think they have push notifications in XMPP these days. At least Prosody has modules like mod_unified_push and mod_cloud_notify and that seems to be supported for example by Conversations.im
To be honest, I didn't have lots of battery drain, back when I used XMPP. And other old-school protocols like e-mail and sip voip don't seem to be very bad either with whatever mechanisms they use. Or my phone isn't reporting battery drain correctly.... And with Matrix I also had to set up push notifications manually, or it'd just receive messages with a random delay per default.
I never really understood why people here push XMPP so hard. It is fragmented as a protocol and lacks mainstream apps and servers.
I think something like Nextcloud Talk or Simplex Chat would be much better
Because it's an open and decentralized protocol in the same vein as email. It is the most likely to survive in the longterm as it's not tied to a single entity.
Fragmentation is inevitable in a decentralized protocol. Look at email or http servers, there is no standard mainstream app but a standard extensible protocol, that's how the internet was originally designed to grow. Now that corporations are pushing their own protocols, they have an incentive to lock users in their ecosystem.
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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