Hi. I have a group of 6 people using Discord to chat. Recently Discord changed a lot and we’re looking for an alternative. We have a few requirements:
- Good client on multiple platforms
- Easy to use search
- Self hosted
- Permanently saved chat history & attachments on server (no expiration)
- Easy image upload (Ctrl+V to post image from clipboard)
IRC isn’t an option as chat history is saved on the client, and there’s no good integrated way to share files and preview images. Matrix would be an overkill as we’re a small group not interested in federation, and the available clients had a few bugs. Mattermost lacks a good mobile app (their current one had bunch of bugs). XMPP appears to be the best as it is extensible and has many clients available.
However, I tried configuring prosody on my FreeBSD server and it seems like it doesn’t permanently save chat history or attachment files. Does anyone know if these can be solved? Or is there any better alternative than XMPP?
Thanks.
Let me add the following: the problem is that that metadata is all over the place AND you can’t remove it from those 3rd party servers. Also there’s a ton of questionable stuff like read receipts and reactions that are never encrypted (not sure if this was fixed already). XMPP with OMEMO enables will encrypt everything.
Currently the OMEMO as implemented in most clients only encrypts message content, but not the meta-data. There is a newer, sadly incompatible version that encrypts more, but few XMPP clients support it (AFAIK only Kaidan and Moxxy).
About the metadata part: one of the issues with Matrix is that it considers some stuff like read receipts as metadata. In XMPP all that information is special messages inside your conversation thus they get encrypted as well.