Snikket is meant to be super simple to self-host. Ejabberd has a web GUI that can make configuration easier.

Sony Xperia 5 III (has headphone jack) with LineageOS for microG. Shanling Q1 DAP/DAC. My everyday IEMs I take out of the house are Truthear Nova. I have a 10-year-old Ridge wallet & a mound of coins in the other pocket. Motorbike keys have nothing special other than an OnlyKey for TOTP/FIDO2.

History / sync is known as message archive management (MAM) & every normal modern client & server supports it. OMEMO uses same double-ratchet encryption & multiple clients as Matrix (with the same old client key dropping issues sadly). By default it does not support groups you are correct, however, FOSS Jitsi (& Zoom for that matter) is powered by XMPP under the hood & can be stood up by yourself.

Personally three of my circles have opted for separate Mumble servers for voice coms (I run one of them from my living room) as video is only ever rarely needed & the system resources is minimal. Having web cams on is seen as a chore & distraction sometimes. The only time video is helpful in my experience is screen share which is different—but screensharing is the worst tool for trying to do code pairing / debugging a terminal using upterm provides a crisper view experience, lower data/system requirements, & observers can optionally drive the remote session.

You could switch some of the problems with perf in switching away from the Python implementation server as well as Element clients but these support the most up-to-date features & the majority of users are now relying on these features that often don’t degrade graacefully.

The bigger issue is eventual consistency. Eventual consistency will not scale for small self-hosting. Every message & every attachment for every user in every chatroom they have joined must be duplicated to your server. This is why joining rooms sometmies takes 10 minutes. Even if you make this async from the client side instead of the current long wait, your server & storage are still taking the hit. A lot of small collectives had to drop their servers for performance & cost (read about yet another one today on the Techlore thread at c/privacy where now only Discord is used for realtime coms). This model is required to copycat the ability to search the entire history like the big, proprietary chat apps such as Slack/Telegram/Discord, but they are centralized so it is easier to manage—but its overuse for all announcement & trying to replace forums turns it into a black hole for information. Your small community probably does not need persistent chat like this—persistent info is lighter & easier to crawl as feeds & forums. With medium-sized servers shutting down, only the biggest & smallest hosts are still kicking with most metadata is largely centralized around Matrix.org who also hosts some of the other larger instances.

If you agree that chat can be chatter as well as ephemeral there is lightweight centralized chat in IRCv3 with TLS has most of the features you need with a longer legacy & massive choice for clients & XMPP for lightweight decentralized chat with a long legacy, client options too, & can be self-hosted in a bedroom on a toaster in comparison which increases the chances of self-hosters & decentralization. These were built in a time when we didn’t have such wasteful taste in tech since they needed to be efficient & only sip power/data in comparison both for clients & servers & storage. The bigger question IMO is what are fundamentally wrong with these two mature options that we need a new option built on unextensible JSON & Israeli Intelligence money?

Hardening aside, I like that LibreWolf actually lets you turn on JPEG XL.

If you want a rush, try gyukuro. Flavor of an umami green tea with the caffeine level of a cup of coffee & high L-thiamine to cut the jitters.

I lived it the UK briefly & my roommate never understood my fascination generally preferring his Yorkshire tea (trash). One day he asked about it so I made him a mug (we used coffee mugs). He said it tasted like yard clippings like other green teas before walking off continuing to sip to not waste it. He comes back in 15–20 minutes later over halfway finished, “Did you put drugs in this‽”. “Nope.” “I feel like I want to run a marathon. Okay, I see the appeal for your mornings, but this is the worst high ever.”

It also powers the communications / presence on many gaming avenues as well like Fortnite, League of Legends, & whatever Nintendo is using for notifications + online status (assuredly a lot more games).

XMPP is old, stable, & massively scalable for industrial applications -- while maintaining decentralization + efficiency & allowing for extensibility like OMEMO encryption which is covering most folk’s chat use cases. Since the XMPP foundation don’t put budget into marketing & hype, a lot of folks weirdly assume it’s dead or not being used. It’s strange to me how folks seem more interested in RCS & Matrix despite their histories/ownership/flaws rather than embracing what is already good.

I do prepaid & get a new plan anually. It’s cheaper this way, less surprising bill-wise, & the rotation of numbers can help with security & privacy. All the carriers suck here equally but coverage is the same so I just see who is offering the best deal.

Meanwhile Matrix was built & funded by Israeli Intelligence (to which I’m sure there are anonymous donors today). It’s expensive replication model means only those with the deepest of pockets can run a server leading many to flock to the mother instance of Matrix.org centralizing, replicating the data to a single node (being decentralized in theory, not so much is practice). It’s funny to see them call out Signal, but luckily there are private, free alternatives to both.

Wreaths are in season 🌲

Meetings, managing email/chat, valuing the team over your personal grade where all shocks when I first started.

I like the idea, but Gemini lacks the accessibility & performance HTTP brings & the spec has issue too. I’d rather see like a new compliance suite for the non-shitty web because the last year’s tech is/was good, but some of the reigns should be pulled in—especially the web appification of web pages that have no business being anything other than just a static page.