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Any other interesting open source chat servers besides rocketchat these days?
user3028938
Member
I was thinking I might pivot from a forum to a self-hosted chat server for my intended project as there is little point I think for having a forum and chat server might be better since it is more about community than technical; the latter being where forums shine but the forum I believe will be better for the intended purpose due to better engagement and real time discussion.
I ran a rocketchat server a few years ago as I despise stupid discord however it ended up dying because stupid lazy people did not want to sign up for a new thing they have never heard of when 'all my friends are on discord'.
I think this may be less of an issue with new intended userbase as I doubt they would use discord anyways, not being techy or gamer inclined, only knowing the big social media giants.
Rocketchat was fairly good overall and I recall during my research there was another one on my shortlist called zulip. I think I didn't go with the latter due to, iirc, less robust topic management or something, can't recall.
Hmm actually I might try a matrix server this time as that is a good mature project with quite some popularity among the open source community and been going quite a few years.
That was in the running too but I abandoned it in favor of rocketchat the time before as, from memory, they had the absolutely stupid idea of not being able to delete messages or rooms at all, even if you are the admin. You would have had to do some really circuitous stuff like deleting it from the drive directly but there seemed no api to support it that I remember. I had been waiting for them to add this before feeling I would try it again and was pleased to see they do seem to offer deletion of rooms now having read about it not long ago.
Oh I think I remember another issue with matrix rooms was no channel support or anything similar and you had to make whole new rooms. Is there a way now to divide a room into topics, like discord channels?
Oh yet another big hurdle with matrix/element is I know when I login is ALWAYS asks me for the key reverification stuff which even I find a nuisance. As I am not interested in this being an encrypted server this is not necessary and will turn off most new users I would bet.
Ah I see on a quick search there have been some threads with other recommendations but interested to hear people's experiences who have used any.
Points for recommendations of which would be most likely to be adopted by braindead social media junkies. As in which would have the smoothest onboarding and user experience and not require extensive tech skills or patience? I would reckon matrix/element coupling would still be leader probably due to maturity? I use element personally and it is very clean and simple.
Like another user wrote on the search function message I just read rocketchat would have random bugs and other idiosyncrasies and was not polished when I tried it about 7 years ago and that message from 2024 seems to indicate not much has changed.
Comments
IRC 🔥
yes this
Edit: Seems u have some issues with it -- though it works fine for my use case
It's a joke? I think it will be too old school for most new users. I like old school but the user base will be generally more 20s so I think they would find it unpalatable.
Yea but see my caveats after it, which are many, the main one being the forced reverication of your key on each login, unless you can disable that stuff?
Both yes and no.
Yes, it's an old tech, but it also still has potential. (and it's pretty easy to setup and host as a vps owner.)
Yeah that might be a problem. I like IRC, but having to setup a bouncer for persistent sessions is not really user friendly.
I wish there was like a modern version of IRC, tbh.
for me it didn't come every time -- like I was just logged in and it worked, then I started using desktop & mobile app [element currently] & it doesn't ask me for keys now
I was reading up on matrix again last night and it does seem like irc with the rooms and finding them. Now that may be a total sacrilege statement for anyone who is very familiar with irc, which I am not, but just my initial feeling I got when reading up on matrix again.
I used irc very little, only once or twice.
Matrix seems a good one to try for me as it has good support and infrastructure and there is also the whole fediverse stuff which has always interested me since learning about it.
Matrix also seem to hate discord for the same reasons I do with a detailed article on why it sucks compared to matrix which was a satisfying read.
https://www.irccloud.com/ has a mobile app and persistency.
Rocket chat isn't intended to be a social media platform like Discord. It can be used for that, but it's intended for internal business chats like Teams or Slack.
TheLounge is pretty modern for irc and it works on mobile as a progressive web app.
Matrix is very slow. Unfortunately, I think it's kind of a failure.
XMPP MUCs work well, but they're not like Discord. They're more like group chats in WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal.
Element + Matrix
Response to this below?
I have noticed no such thing.
Well I didn't say I must have a discord clone, far from it I hate the babyish design. Whatsapp is beloved among mainstreamers so something like that would be fine for adoption purposes.
Woah, IRCcloud is still a thing! I remember using it in like, 2013 or 2014 or something to stay connected and signed in to vpsBoard and LowEndTalk IRC servers.
Irc
Xmpp
Tox
Etc
I think you'll like XMPP then. Check out https://snikket.org/service/quickstart/
It's supposedly 6000x faster now than when I used it: https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-element/
One can always open an IRC server, or a whole IRC network. IRC has evolved a lot over the years while retaining its simplicity.
It's kind of bad in a browser(some odd lag at times), but the mobile app works pretty well. If only mIRC had a mobile version... 😔