this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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Hey guys, I recently started to play with the thought to deploy a Snikket (XMPP) server on my VPS to play around with it a bit. I already had a Matrix (Continuwuity) server running on an older VPS with Docker at one point. But besides me using some bridges (WhatsApp, Signal etc.) it didn't see a lot of use. Originally I had set it up with the goal to replace Discord, but so far couldn't get my small group of gamer friends to switch to something else.

What are your experiences with XMPP (doesn't have to be Snikket) or Matrix? Would you recommend one over the other maintenance and/or usability wise?

Just curious what the community's current sentiment is in regards to private self hosted messaging services ๐Ÿ˜Š

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[โ€“] artyom@piefed.social 5 points 5 months ago

I haven't use XMPP much. Matrix is kind of a nightmare. It has most of the important things of a chat platform but as others have said, is a pain in the butt to use. Encryption issues, slow loading, images not loading, etc. It's also basically on-par with something like WhatsApp, security-wise, in that your message content is encrypted but pretty much nothing else is, and when 90%+ of users are in the matrix.org domain anyway, that's not acceptable, in my opinion.

I would recommend SimpleX instead.