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(XMPP Setup Guide) Discord Was Never the End Game - TonyBTW (www.youtube.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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[–] 13 points 8 months ago (10 children)

Googling I got their docs and a github for running through docker, the docs which are empty, and the docker that has the help of claude code.

I try to not poo poo folks working on projects too much, but like why am I here over XMPP or Matrix?

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    That github looks like a fork of the original code. I never heard of fluxer so I can't really trust it since I've only ever heard people gathering opinions rather than reviews, a fork even less so. So for my honest opinion, it's a no for me since it seems like a very round about way to onboard anyone who wants to self-host.

    Since we're here, I've tried giving stoat.chat a go and got it semi-working but the way they have the project set up, there's a lot of optional "bloat" that gets tacked on from the build.

    What I had success with, was Continuwuity. Their docs were so good, I was not only able to set up chat but also new and legacy voice and video under 4 hours.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah that is yucky, seems like self hosting hasn't really been at the forefront of intention for the project. From the looks of it, them being in Sweden it might have started as a "buy EU" sort of discord clone that was pulled into the death of discord conversation with the ID stuff.

    Interesting times 🫠

    Curious your thoughts on stoat, that came out of revolt correct? What sorts of bloat did you find?

    4 is definitely a good benchmark for self hosting! lol Have you run Synapse, and how did that compare?

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)

    Sorry for the later reply, was working (oops, not really). From what I read, Stoat is just a rename of Revolt and the platform should really remain the same (when I had this up, some of the UI still read Revolt).

    For the bloat, as a self-hoster (speaking for myself and not on the behalf of anyone else), you should try to be provided with the most direct solution to a specific issue. When looking at Stoat, and the output of the generate_config.sh, they basically shove down a whole lot of solution at one time. There's from what I can tell, 15 different configurations for containers, over half of them are static versions and who knows how they all intermingle between the configs (Jesus, that's a lot of config files). This produces a monstrous web of configuration that I really have no time to digest and get working for something I'm just 'playing around with'. All this and I didn't even attempt to integrate voice and video. Also (as a nitpick) requires you to spin up caddy but has a config to point to that to a different reverse-proxy if needed (I already had nginx proxy manager and got this working but the whole thing fails if you don't spin up caddy. insert sad horse noises).

    This is where Continuwuity comes in, I have 4 containers that I have bespoke configured myself by reading the configs and 2 config files that I hand made based off the docs. I feel WAYYYY better at hosting this than Stoat. Even got the wife to help test the video and voice and it works great with Element. From start to end, took me 4-ish hours to be done.

    I have hosted Synapse before and got it up and running but not with voice and video. IMO, it's a little bloaty as well (not nearly as bad as Stoat) but it's doable. Never attempted voice and video for this but again, Continuwuity is just much more straightforward and less overhead.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    No worries, thank you for the detailed reply!

    Sounds like a solid way to do it, and a support the uwuification of all software, so that's an extra bonus! Might have to futz around with it and see what sort of mess I can get myself into.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (5 children)

    Because the people make the platform, and not the functions, and for lots of people you need a lower entry barrier, and the entry barrier for both of those is a good bit higher than fluxer.

    Don't get me wrong, if matrix was a bit more convenient (easier to understand and to use like you would discord, and less bugs of which there are still a wide range of), I'd 100% advocate for it. But I can only tell my friends to use something if it's convenient enough that they will genuinely avoid a degraded experience.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

    That's valid, and I think I was coming off a bit of frustration from the previous comment I made in this chain. There are so many new apps that all try and build the features of discord, but always seem to base in closed protocols and so rarely use protocols that already exist, and with that add to the "15 competing standards" problem. Which is why I get much more excited by projects like Movim.

    With all of that though, while I agree element has hiccups, XMPP has been around forever and is solid. We saw this with twitter migration too, the existence of other servers makes it seem more difficult, when that's not really the case. As this video shows, go to the place to want to sign up, give a user and password, confirm you're human, and use it. That's already less than the email confirmation of discord.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Now this is a question: how far can you get with xmpp? Could you build an interface on top of it to look exactly like discord with all of it's functions? Or does something like that already exist?

    My first instinct with these older protocols is that there's no way they could support 10 people in a voice call with concurrent camera streams and 3 screen captures. I'm genuinely curious how far xmpp goes.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    XMPP is wildly extendable, my limited understanding is that Jingle is the extension used for this. From the abstract:

    This specification defines an XMPP protocol extension for initiating and managing peer-to-peer media sessions between two XMPP entities in a way that is interoperable with existing Internet standards. The protocol provides a pluggable model that enables the core session management semantics (compatible with SIP) to be used for a wide variety of application types (e.g., voice chat, video chat, file transfer) and with a wide variety of transport methods (e.g., TCP, UDP, ICE, application-specific transports).

    I haven't seen anything about the the extrema of the use cases like that, but Movim is working on building out many of the features of discord and it is built on XMPP.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    Could you build an interface on top of it to look exactly like discord with all of it’s functions?

    In theory yes, and Movim is movim' in that direction (yeah I invented that pun, blame me). That's part of the trick with XMPP, it's quite extensible.

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