Do you prefer XMPP or Matrix, or are you using something else entirely?
Given you propose to chose between 2 federated solutions, I assume you want a good robust federation. So it’s easy: XMPP, period.
Anyone who has experienced self-hosting knows Matrix is several times heavier on memory and CPU than XMPP, and that’s one of the reasons 99% of the Matrix users are on 1 server, while I actually dnn’t even know which XMPP server is the largest.:
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Matrix, and it’s not even close.
Matrix clients suck, but xmpp ones are way worse.
I don’t know what people use discord for, honestly. I just call up my friends on signal for the regularly scheduled gaming session and play. All I need is audio.
I don’t understand what people need video or screen sharing for while gaming. Are they playing a game watching each other’s facial reactions or something? And others talk about screen sharing… Are you guys gaming while watching the other person’s screen? I’m puzzled.
Signal can audio and video calls with screen sharing 🤷
Matrix I only use for opensource projects or as a replacement or client for IRC (IRC sucks ass). There was also a time fosdem streamed everything on matrix. It was glorious. I wish more conferences (and fosdem itself) had chatrooms for every talk, rooms for different topics, and a general chat room for everybody. We don’t have to fly and waste fuel to participate in conferences. Not everybody has deep enough pockets to pay 2k for a flight to Sydney and a further 1k for food and lodging there. Or worse, a trip to the US to get fondled by US border patrol and sent to Guantanamo bay for having said “Trump is a dunce”.
Not a huge user of screensharing, but it does come up, and I’d probably miss it if I lost it. Here’s a few recent examples:
- Playing a 1v1 PVP game, such as Elden Ring or Armoured Core, taking turns with 3 players, it’s nice to be able to share POVs so that the waiting player can watch.
- Setting up for a TTRPG, it was nice to share the online character builder to more easily ask for advice on something like “which move should I take?”.
- Playing Valheim, we all died except 1, and he shared his screen so we could guide him to our bodies with the materials to build a portal for us to get back easily.
I’m certainly not sharing my screen all the time, but it comes up fairly often that something happens that you want to show the group when they can’t just look at it with you in-game. It all depends on what kinds of games you’re playing and how large a group you’re playing with.
My gaming friend group is 8 or 9 people. When you want to hang out digitally, you just jump in our discord and see who is currently playing. You jump in the channel, join the conversation. If the others are currently in a match that can’t be hot joined, someone will put on a stream for you, so you can watch and have an easier time joining the conversation.
Sometimes a friend is playing a game that you don’t own or they want to show you. Easily done with a stream. Streaming on Discord is very useful to us.
We use the webcam feature for our Tabletop Roleplaying Sessions.
One “feature” that Discord has that will be missed by our small community: Being able to see who is in a voice call without having to join it.
We have spent the last week exploring alternatives and it looks like we will be using a combination of self hosted matrix and mumble unless self hosted stoat gets voice very soon.
So Mumble for voice chat and Matrix for text chat?
Exactly.
Matrix has voice chat. You can enable it in the element client. Settings, Labs, video voice experiment. Enable it and you can have voice and video rooms.
Does your group ever use video calls and/or screen sharing?
Yes. Those are not supported in mumble. For those we’d probably pop up a jitsi session.
I haven’t found a solid answer for this…does XMPP support proper history nowadays? I remember using XMPP servers back around 2012 and if you didn’t have your client open, you just missed messages in rooms. If that’s still the case, ut’s a lretty significant draw back…
It does for me, but I’m not sure whether it does in a general way, or if that’s because of some extension on the server I’m running.
I can send a message to my mates, or vice versa, and if we’re not online those will be delivered to us next time we connect. It’s been perfectly seamless.
However they have complained about multi-device support, where they want to log in sometimes from a phone and sometimes from a desktop. Apparently that is a less polished experience.
My gaming groups use Matrix, mainly for its stronger ecosystem and better long-term outlook. Despite developing slowly and not yet doing everything we want, Matrix is consistently improving and growing to serve more and more use cases. We’re willing to tolerate some inconveniences for now, in exchange for having the contact networks we build today continue to grow for decades to come. We use Mumble for voice chat, because it’s great, but might switch to MatrixRTC when Element Call leaves beta and becomes available in more Matrix clients.
I recently wrote up a few tips for Discord users considering Matrix.
If chat for a small gaming group was all I needed, I might choose XMPP. It’s arguably easier to administer than Matrix once you learn about all the XEPs required for comparable features (ease of admin is relevant to me because I self-host) and I would be able to guide a small group through client choices and setup. But I have found XMPP’s ecosystem to be a poor fit for large and diverse contact networks.
The XMPP clients I’ve seen look unusable for large scale messaging, so between the two Matrix
Edit: Actually I need to look into Movin
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From my digging on alternatives the main contenders are (in no particular order)
- Stoat
- Essentially 1:1 on discords format
- UK based, so its future there is uncertain
- Infrastructure is lacking, was crippled by the initial influx after discord’s announcement.
- Missing some minor UI and UX features, feels unpolished.
- Spacebar
- Reverse engineered discord
- Greatest potential, IMO, but as of a few days ago all it has is potential.
- lacks significant client development, relying on an external client named Fermi, which feels quite amateurish.
- XMPP
- Highly mature, looks very promising, but lacks any kind of guild/nested channel grouping support which makes it unsuitable for my group, so I didn’t look too deep at it.
- Matrix
- IMO the most likely discord successor.
- Minor functional hiccups, that vary from client to client
- Of the clients I tested, Cinny is the most discord like, but I hear commet is closer.
- Nested spaces provides the minimum format equivalence.
- Fluxer
- Slightly sus vibes
- Lacks self hosting instructions
- Media is non-permanent, which is I guess fair to keep infra costs down, but its unsuitable for my groups media usage habits.
- Looks promising, but I’ve not actually tried it given the lack of self hosting instructions.
One thing that’s wormed its way onto the to do list that haunts the back of my mind, is I’d like to see if I could abuse the matrix or XMPP protocols to get some of the nicer discord-like features lime invite links, server side channel ordering, and space membership over channel membership. But that’s unlikely to happen any time soon.
EDIT: Forgot Fluxer. Added.
One thing that’s wormed its way onto the to do list that haunts the back of my mind, is I’d like to see if I could abuse the matrix or XMPP protocols to get some of the nicer discord-like features lime invite links
I think I’ve seen invite links being proposed for Matrix, but I don’t remember the status of that idea, and can’t find a relevant MSC at the moment.
This bot looks like it could be helpful for now:
https://github.com/dfuchss/matrix-joinlink
https://www2.matrix.org/blog/2024/05/24/this-week-in-matrix-2024-05-24/#matrixjoinlink
XMPP knows invite links, there are even servers which support invite pages which list suitable clients one could use for XMPP. Prosody for example has this module you could enable: mod_invites_page
And then there is also Snikket, which is a pre-configured XMPP server suite (running prosody under the hood) with some nice QoL improvements baked in which you can selfhost as well: Snikket Quick Start Selfhost
Holy…! Thanks for mentioning Commet this is so much better than Element - I think there is a good chance I can move people to Matrix using this!
While I agree with feeling a bit off , Fluxor seems closest to feature complete. Overall what Stoat has an offer works well. They are updating their infrastructure and so Fluxor.
The Matrix and XMPP are still all over the place. Unless one client comes out to rule them all. And none such really take the crown.
Honestly If there is issues with LLM it might be better to stick with Stoat.
- XMPP
Highly mature, looks very promising, but lacks any kind of guild/nested channel grouping support which makes it unsuitable for my group, so I didn’t look too deep at it.
No XMPP clients currently have that feature, but the Movim client is actively working on implementing it, and it should be ready in a few weeks. They recently launched a modest funding campaign to accelerate development.
- Fluxer
- Slightly sus vibes
Can you elaborate on this part?
a chat app that has more feature parity with Discord than any other project, yet:
- was supposedly built over the course of five years but commit history was squashed a couple months ago so there’s no way to verify
- was built entirely by one 22yo who hasn’t yet graduated university
- has confirmed LLM usage
- already has a monetization plan very similar to Discord and has raised 300k in one-time funding on hype alone
all this to say, it’s still an incredibly impressive piece of software, but the sus vibes are warranted
Yeah, the limited time offering of lifetime plans really set my radar off. Seemed stretch as hell, especially given the timing.
- Fluxer
Which ones are federated?
I belive just Matrix and XMPP.
Do they have voice chat integration? It’s not a big deal for me, but for a lot apparently it is.
Yes XMPP supports voice. Had for well over a decade, maybe two.
I’m not too sure, I didn’t look terribly deeply on that front since that’s not something my group uses often, and its difficult to test on my own. That said, I believe Matrix does have some level of voice chat support, though AFAIK its more similar to Skype’s calls than Discord’s drop-in/drop-out voice channels. No idea about XMPP though.
Movim.eu seems to be. Rocketchat also claims to federate via matrix
- Stoat
The problem is that “Discord” means something else for almost anyone and there is no alternative that 100% covers all the usecases.
For many public chats, IRC with a modern server and client is perfectly suitable, and for my private gaming sessions Mumble is as voice chat is doing fine even though friends are complaining that they can’t just use it in a browser.
For general IM stuff XMPP is best, but I guess few people use Discord for that. Matrix is in general slow and clunky, no real point of using that except if you are forced to because some very specific FOSS projects insist on using it.
P.S.: I mostly use IRC through a XMPP gateway.
I prefered xmpp. But either xmpp or matrix arent discord alternatives
It’s in progress
Wut
That’s a screenshot of the Movim client’s WIP of Discord-like servers w/spaces, which is being rapidly worked on.
Dang that looks really nice, finally a decent decentralized chat client!
Fluxer is currently my top contender. It’s AGPL and federation is on the roadmap.
IMHO XMPP is far more architecturally sound and not driven by buzzword-development.
IMHO XMPP is far more architecturally sound
I lost track of the technical status of IRC long ago so maybe it can do this too. XMPP at least, can support true E2EE, not just end to server. My mates and I use that for normal chatting, sending our vacation pics around, photos of our kids with their new puppy, things like that.
It’s worked well. Free of big-tech. Hopefully free of snoops and mass surveillance. I’m 100% sure any three letter agency could get in, if one ever cared to hear us prattling on about microbrews. The point is to opt out of the information dragnet, not to be all Jason Bourne.
XMPP has been the cat’s pajamas so far.
Why did you two opt for XMPP rather than Signal Messenger?
When me and my mates set this up, Signal was only available on phones, not desktops. It also required providing a phone number to a central authority, which some of us were not comfortable doing. With XMPP we got the choice of a large number of clients to pick from. Both the server and the clients were lightweight.
I just had a search maybe you can self host a Signal server, but I did not know that at the time. I wanted to self-host. So that was a reason too, but maybe (?) a false reason. The Signal self hosting situation may be murky. My brief search found some claims that the official app does not support using other servers, and you need a customized app to do it. It might be more self host-able in theory than in practice. XMPP had multiple servers to pick from, and lots of clients.
All those things could balance more toward Signal if your priorities are different, tho.
Yeah the self-hosting thing is new, its really clunky and they dont encourage you not to use it. I think (?) they may have even discontinued it.
Its odd to me that Signal is supposedly the gold standard yet it breaks all these privacy 101 rules. Such as requiring you hand over your phone number to a central authority, not really allowing you to self host, and not posting an official app on fdroid. I’ve heard that portions of its official repo are not even open source (though I haven’t verified this for myself). XMPP sounds like the better choice to be honest.
maybe the phone number requirement on signal? that would be a dealbreaker if any of them didn’t have one
It also might be a dealbreaker from a privacy perspective. It’s weird that Signal, which is supposedly the gold standard, has this requirement.
Having installed both this week, I much prefer XMPP. I want it as something more like signal/whatsapp just for my immediate family. Some are too young for a phone number, but I want them to join in the fun.
It was a but of messing around getting prosody to work how I want, but I’m really happy with it. It works with my letsencrypt certs. Phone and video calls just work. MySql just works with it. The tricky one was getting it to auth with same credentials as the mail daemon, but I got that going too. It’s seamless now.
Matrix was 90% features I would not use.
Why has IRC not been mentioned? The basics of Discords UX is based on it after all.
I suspect many Discord refugees will be looking for an all-in-one app that can do both solid text chat with discord-style servers and many rooms/spaces in them, as well as the ability to seamlessly have voice/video calls with groups of friends, as well as screenshare applications to watch movies together or stream games while chatting.
IRC is only capable of the text chat part, and would require an additional video conferencing app with a separate account to fulfill the video call part, which most would find off-putting after having it all-in-one for over a decade.
And IRC now has web clients that can display inline images, upload them on a channel, preview URLs, push notifications, keep history, and more.
I use The Lounge but there is also Convos and a few others.
Xmpp. Looks less polished, but works better, and isn’t mostly controlled by the ex-Amdocs Matrix Foundation.
