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

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)

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

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...

@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

@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 +1 for XMPP, been a good experience for me over the last year

@r0ss mind to share your setup?

@mntmn oh, ouch

@mntmn I tried to get my family off of WhatsApp on to Signal but got nowhere.

@alex ah, meh. luckily my folks are already quite skeptical of meta

@mntmn XMPP has a very good IRC bridge too so one app can be used for both internal company comms and for irc support

@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?

@mntmn I use prosody for the server and the clients I recommend are gajim, dino, Conversations.im, Cheogram app (basically C.im but with extra features for bridge use)

and if you're a terminal fan you might like poezio and profanity, though they're not very well maintained these days :( there's a weechat xmpp client too but last time I tried it just made weechat crash

@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 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)

@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

@fun that's cool!

@mntmn Have you heard of our lord and saviour IRC?

@kestral sure, and i use it, but i'm not aware of a recipe to roll out IRC to a bunch of nontechnical users seamlessly incl automatic bouncers / history replay for everyone

@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.

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 prosody if you don't want to hate self

on iOS you want siskin or monal if you want omemo to function right, on android conversations is the only reasonable choice, on desktop you want dino or these days gajim also works fine and no longer has a terrible UI

@q66 thanks for those hints!

@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

@tahnok @mntmn
I originally had problems on my prosody server: iOS clients would not get notifications when the app was closed... until I added the cloud_notify_* and snikket_* modules

https://zachdecook.com/2026-01-24.prosody.cfg.lua

(the snikket ones need to be extracted from snikket sources, slightly more convoluted than standard extension installation)

@mntmn Neil Brown’s blog mentions he’s used Snikket and Jitsi in a business capacity. Sounds like they’re worth investigating from his experiences.

https://neilzone.co.uk/

He’s on here as @neil

@neil @mike @mntmn

> 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.

@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 I have only good things to say about prosody. Been running it for over >10 years. It's a great piece of software.

@vimja nice!

@mntmn I use @news (openfire) and @monocles (a fork of conversations) as a while ago it had more features than conversations, but maybe it has caught up now.

Both are pretty stable, but sometimes monocles doesn't automatically resend failed messages, which is a bit annoying.

@mntmn yeah that works, except for encrypted messages (IIRC?)

@fun that's fine, e2e encryption isn't necessary at all for this use case

@mntmn @lislegaard And DeltaChat is Electron. It's impossible to secure.

@mntmn oh no it'd be terrible for that, I was mostly just attempting to be funny.

@mntmn the word "attempting" doing some heavy lifting

@mntmn @fun

Yup, #biboumi ftw!

@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 The Yunohost setup + Monal and Conversations looks very solid to me. No problems with media. Monal has got no search though.