There seem to be plentiful options for text chat servers, so I’m curious for those that self-host their own, what their preferences & experiences have been with them.
Also those mentioned in the title were just a few examples, if you run something else, e.g. Revolt or Mattermost or something else less popular, would be interested in reading about it!
I’m a big fan of Matrix, as it’s easily accessible from anywhere - plus I already have a server for it spun up going on two years now which makes it easier for me.
Personally, its a combination of the following reasons:
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I’m not held to another server, and self-hosting my own makes sure that whomever hosting the server doesn’t just close the doors one day and decide they’re no longer going to do so
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I find it fun to setup my own services, like Matrix, Lemmy, Mastodon, etc
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I control what servers are blocked / defederated from, from my knowledge though defederating on Matrix doesn’t happen nearly as often as it does for ActivityPub based platforms however.
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I created Matrix accounts for some of my family members to communicate with, and if they lose the password I know that I can reset it for them rather than hoping they setup the account recovery info correctly.
I host Synapse (Matrix)
Runs without problems and it just works 🌞
Mine just stopped working when not on the local network and I haven’t had the energy to find out why and then to fix it and then to convince everyone I’d brought in that this time will be different
Never used it in LAN. Always used a VPS for this with a domain name, no DynDNS or similar.
Mine only works on lan. The ddns checks out, but clients over the internet get nothing.
How much does a vps cost running your matrix client? It can’t be more than a couple bucks a month right?
XMPP with prosody is good once you’ve figured out the modules you need.
Unfortunately, I had to quit a few years back as there was no reliable iOS client. Long story short: notifications were never working as expected on that plateform.
Matrix.org is overkill for my needs, but at least notifications work accross the board 👍
XMPP is in my opinion the best compromise between modern features and lightweight to selfhost. Also of course fully federated.
You can learn more about it on https://joinjabber.org
Or if you just want to try it with a nice web-client, try https://movim.eu
I’m in a irc channel with a bunch of internet friends. I like how ancient it is, it reminds me of the old internet. The limitations are severe however and I would never suggest to anyone to use IRC as a text chat server. Without these people and the nostalgia I would go for matrix I think.
The good news is that with ircv3 being worked on, it may soon(ish) be quite dusted. :) It adds features like reply threads, history from when you weren’t connected, message editing and deletion, and more!
I both love and hate this. I love to see IRC getting some love and these features are massive QoL improvements. I say this as a regular IRC user. On the other hand though, no touch da fishy.
They do maintain the simplicity of the line oriented protocol, so I’m fine with that. :)
That’s the strongest point of IRC, IMO, and why it’s kept so simple : every instruction is a plain text line, period. It makes it incredibly simple to build on top of it. You don’t need to introduce a dependency to a project that probably will be abandonned in a few years, at which point you’ll have to rewrite your codebase to use an other dependency, for a few years. You just open a TCP connection, you read lines from the socket and write lines to it, each line is its own instruction structured in well known fields, and that’s it. It’s so simple!
As long as IRCv3 sticks to that, they have my blessing. :)
AFAIK even without ircv3 history is possible - at least Unrealircd offers such an option (https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Channel_history). However, I have only ever seen this utilized once, on a very small server.
Yep, as often, the extension of the standard comes from non standard features developed here are there (as you can see in the participating organizations block, most of the big names are working on this). The difference in ircv3 is that you can expect to see all those features everywhere, instead of having this software implementing this feature, that other one having that other feature, and you have to choose which one is the most important for you. Basically, it’s a rebase of the standard. :)
https://thelounge.chat/ with any IRC server (but IRCv3 like https://ergo.chat is best) works very nicely, including mobile support and push notifications etc. Also includes a bouncer for full history and a file upload service for image sharing.
The limitations are severe however and I would never suggest to anyone to use IRC as a text chat server.
I’m a little confused, if all you wanted from it was text chat, isn’t that pretty much exactly what it is as a result of its limitations? Regardless, for the majority of folks I think you’re probably right that it may not be advisable given its limits.
Oh well, there are different implementations of IRC, and some limit you more than others. Flood protection is a pita if you want to share long text, since max message length is not that much. Netsplits are still a thing and your nick can’t be longer than 15 chars. Text formatting works on most servers, but that’s no guarantee. The length of a channel topic is also limited. You interact with the server only through the same messages you send to your chats. You need some kind of bouncer to still follow a chat if offline.
