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.
Does XMPP not have the same metadata?
No, or rather not quite. XMPP is designed on a need-to-see system where basically only the meta-data that a server or client really requires to function is shared with it. This can mean that there is quite a bit of meta-data shared with various servers in a popular group-chat, but that is rather the exception.
Matrix on the other hand is designed as a replicated data-store, meaning that really everything is shared with every connected server by design. The reason for this is so that chats can continue to function even when the original server is removed etc. This was the big original selling point of Matrix, but lately they have been somewhat quiet about it as it largely contradicts privacy concerns and might even be fundamentally GDPR incompatible. In any case it is pretty much a meta-data nightmare.
Well you also can’t remove shit on someone else’s email servers so is that not GDPR compatible?
In the case of email you have to actively send something to someone for it to be on their server. In Matrix it is sufficient for a 3rd party to join a chat for them to get the entire chat history (hopefully e2ee) including all meta-data back to the very first day the chat was created.
They’re actually working on that, which is nice. It’s called lazy loading I think? Not sure if it’s implemented yet.
No, that is only solving the problem of long loading times when first joining a chat (caused by the server having to download the entire chat history and meta-data). Eventually the server still has to synchronize the entire chat. There is no way around it by design.
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.