this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
99 points (95.4% liked)

Selfhosted

60281 readers
732 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Detailed Rules Post

  1. Be civil.

  2. No spam.

  3. Posts are to be related to self-hosting.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title.

  6. No trolling.

  7. Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm looking into a few different chat servers, probably just for family on my tailnet.

I like the idea that simplex allows video chat. My server is a repurposed optiplex 3060so I think it should be able to handle it. Is anyone doing this? Do you think it's worth it?

Should I be considering other options like XMPP?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] BrightCandle@lemmy.world 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Every one always says XMPP and there were a lot of recommendations for ejabberd. I tried this recently and it was a total disaster, I do not have a working chat server. If I followed the docker instructions the server would just crash with no details of what went wrong. Where it should have been creating a default server config file it was instead creating a directory with the wrong permissions then promptly crashing. I tried following their documentation but after about 6 hours of messing about and adding more and more I still couldn't get a client to login to it. I have no idea how to make this work.

So whatever the solution ultimately is I can't recommend Ejabberd.

[โ€“] poVoq@slrpnk.net 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Ejabberd is definitly for more advanced users, but you can usually get help over at joinjabber.org (which has a webclient that you can use without an xmpp account).

But yes, Snikket and Prosody is easier to set up.