i'm a laggard of moving from telegram to signal, but motivating people in some small group chats to migrate incl. those groups has been met with much less resistance than i expected :0 a lot of people already have signal anyway, just never mentioned it
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@mntmn Let me suggest two things myself.
Icewarp
https://www.icewarp.com
European. Payed service.
Citadel
https://citadel.org/roadmap.html
Opensource. Self-Hosted.
Maybe the second one fits your needs best.
You just need to find out how useable the next gen ui is.
meanwhile still scratching my head about where to migrate the company chats to (from self-hosted mattermost, which has become ai infested bloatware with an almost unusably bad and buggy android app and very slow web UI)
@mntmn I used to really like RocketChat (self hosted Slack clone) but I admittedly haven't used it in years, so I have no idea how we'll it's held up.
@mntmn For "instant messaging"+some bells and whistles I have used:
- Slack (Very corporaty, enterprisy and increasingly hostile, but video worked well, no self host)
- Mattermost (was quite nice, now with 10k messages cap, i remeber some controversial stuff)
- Rocket.chat (looked nice, 1..2 UI quirks, self-hosting license bullshit, forced upgrades)
and
- Zulip (only very little interacted, but seemed interesting, thread-origanized)
I would check out the last if I had to.
@mntmn Zulip might be worth considering. Works well to keep many topics organised compared with simpler chat tools; very active development; project appears to be sanely run from what I've looked at.
Mobile push notifications require a paid plan for orgs >10 users, though. https://zulip.com/plans/#self-hosted
@mntmn i tried zulip (https://zulip.com/) a while ago and it worked great. I found it a great alternative to mattermost and other communication platforms
@mntmn Very interested in what you will find 🙈 I‘m also looking into alternatives (both for work and for a group of friends), and all of them have downsides. I feel like IRC has all the features we would need, but the clients (especially on macOS and iOS, which a lot of the colleagues/friends use) are really not great 🥲
@mntmn could look into zulip as well, i found using it very nice
@aks yes, considered it but on self hosted have to pay $3.50 per user, that would be quite expensive for us as we have a bunch of lurkers
@mntmn @aks
what?
It's open source, at $previousjob we've been using it for years without paying anyone...
*looks at https://zulip.com/plans/#self-hosted *
oh, they charge for doing mobile push through their servers :/
but they say open-source projects could be eligible to a free "community plan" which also has unlimited push notifications?
@wolf480pl @aks yeah, before i commit our stuff to another company again i would like to go an independent way this time i think. i'm pretty sure that there was a solution for mobile notifications over xmpp that wasn't a paid solution
@mntmn @aks
I remember XMPP had sth[1] where each client author could provide their own push server that talks to the Google's/Apple's push notifications API, and there was a way for XMPP servers to discovered it.
For each XMPP client implementation it's still a centralized service, but people can switch XMPP clients individually.
But IIRC Conversations also just tries to do idle TCP if it can, bypassing OS's push infrastructure.
1/
@mntmn maybe setup a matrix server? That can work pretty well in my experience.
@eliasr i'm willing to compare it with the xmpp experience in my parallel reply in this thread, but i'm somehow skeptical about matrix, can't really put my finger on it though
Remember, you don't have to use the official "reference implementation" for your Matrix server. #tuwunel for example is pretty easy to run.
CC: @eliasr@librem.one
i'm not convinced by what i've experienced with matrix so far, so currently my top idea is a good XMPP server + customized web app + existing mobile clients + probably some bridges. i wonder how well these things work though:
- image and video upload from mobile
- notifications for mobile
- history sync
- search
@mntmn I think "history sync" and "mobile notifications" are the two top reasons for people to chose something like matrix over xmpp. In one community I'm in we use "zulip". I haven't looked into it closer, just used it so far (no idea about licensing, operational/administrative burden) and it didn't seem overly terrible.
currently looks like i want:
- an xmpp server (not sure yet which one, probably prosody?)
- deploy conversejs with a bit of custom design
- conversations on android
- chatsecure on ios?
@mntmn don't ever use chatsecure, that project has been abandoned for several years now, I don't even know if it works properly with modern Xmpp.
If you want proper push support you should use Monal instead of Siskin or Snikket for iOS. The latter ones made a design decision that works badly with Apple's push design.
For No all you won't even need the extra snikket push modules for prosody and Monal properly works on ejabberd, too.
At $DAYJOB we have #Prosody by @prosodyim as server for ≈ 40 users. #Debian stable. Clients are #Dino by @dino and #Gajim by @gajim. Again Debian stable.
And for mobile users #Conversations_im by @daniel and #Monal by @Monal.
I have installed both #ConverseJS by @jcbrand and #Prose by @prose, but they have ≈ 1 user each.
@mntmn I have only good things to say about prosody. Been running it for over >10 years. It's a great piece of software.
@mntmn Seems reasonable. But ChatSecure is basically unmaintained, push services are down. Monal or Siskin are your best bets I think. But not sure if Siskin will work fully featured without Tigase.
@mntmn just to say my 😜 with prosody + conversations/dino/gajim has been rock solid for more than 5 years. I forgot that i'm using it.
@mntmn I always preferred ejabberd because it seemed more robust to me and some features were implemented faster but I think you can't go wrong with either one. Ejabberd is backed by a company after all and prosody is a community effort! Clients on iOS suck and most of the time it's the notifications that don't work... But it's been a few years since my last foray into xmpp. It is most helpful to join the xmpp chats of the devs though, a very helpful community overall!
@mntmn im surprised jami isnt more popular tbh
but yeah prob a bridge is the best option. way too many options tbh
@mntmn here's my config for prosody, been pretty happy with it and the docs https://cdn.tahnok.ca/u/2025-08-26.prosody.cfg.lua
@mntmn The Yunohost setup + Monal and Conversations looks very solid to me. No problems with media. Monal has got no search though.
@mntmn my experience with matrix: it’s the best of the worst. Works kinda ok with more people too
@mntmn we had a very Bad Experience with matrix. On top of discussions on how secure it actually is, we constantly had to trouble shoot stuff, things broke on the regular.
I’ve been told it‘s a mess to host as well.
What made us switch was the experiences of our non tech members. They were intimidated with the setup and had trouble using it.
We currently use a self hosted mattermost instance. And yep it is not perfect but we haven’t found a better alternative.
@wlana one of my other ideas was writing a new mobile app for mattermost :DD (but that's probably more work than to migrate to xmpp)
@mntmn 😁 how long could it take *two years later*
What are the bugs you noticed? Because we only have notification problems on Android. The rest seems to work fine.
@wlana my app always corrupts itself so that message views repeat the same stuff over and over again, becoming unusable (i think i can purge and reinstall to have it work again for a week or so). image/video uploads are slow and can't be resumed, very frustrating. SVGs are rendered without a background, so are invisible sometimes. the app loads and reacts slowly.
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@mntmn we've been discussing this recently here (context is migrating ttrpg groups from Discord): https://mastodon.opportunis.me/@lila_bliblu/115915684334510449. I wasn't aware of Movim which looks really solid - I'm thinking of testing XMPP next because of it.
So far Matrix's big drawback to me is the fact that no app does multi-account properly on Android, otherwise everything from your list seems to work fine, including when bridged to Discord.
@mntmn
Image + Video uploads => works, except not for me because my file upload thing is broken, been procrastinating to get it fixed (PEBKAC)
Notification => push notification works and some XMPP clients can even be used as UnifiedPush distributors
Search => works really well for channels
History sync => what do you mean?
Image + Video uploads => works, except not for me because my file upload thing is broken, been procrastinating to get it fixed (PEBKAC)
Notification => push notification works and some XMPP clients can even be used as UnifiedPush distributors
Search => works really well for channels
History sync => what do you mean?
@fun for history sync what i mean is:
- if a new person is onboarded, they must be able to browse the complete history of the channels / groups they're invited to (there's knowledge and context there)
- if i install a new client i need this client to have access to my whole chat history that i had on other clients
@mntmn XMPP has a very good IRC bridge too so one app can be used for both internal company comms and for irc support
The lack of syncing is what prevented me from replacing SMS with XMPP about a year ago. I was looking at https://jmp.chat
@mntmn xmpp has been really good for me an 4-5 people. I haven't tried the web app, but prosody and conversations (what a horrible name, lots of forks) work well for Android with photo upload. Gajim is good enough for desktop linux
deltachat is also gaining some momentum combining some of the easy of use from signal with decentralisation.
@lislegaard there's no multi user web app story though...
> image and video upload from mobile
Works fine. (I set basic limits so users aren't able to dump more than my vps can take)
> notifications for mobile
Had issues with iOS clients getting notified until I added some extensions (see my other message for config)
> history sync
Server-side setting for history length (I used two weeks). New clients can't decrypt old encrypted messages.
> search
Client-side, depends on appropriate history sync config to find older msgs.