Selfhosted

Matrix has one caveat: it synchronizes every room (group chat) from another instance to your instance fully- which one user subscribed to on your instance. Because of this the instance-systems/servers are under heavy load for private userage (not controllable number of users and chats). Many governmental institutions (controllable number of users and chats) use though, because in case of "disasters/incidents" the data is not lost but saved all over all replicas.

My partner and I self-host a matrix server + element frontend locally, and we are both in a few federated chats with people and organizations elsewhere.

We mostly stood it up to replace a discord server that we were using for communication, organization, and home automation in anticipation of API/policy changes on Discord's end. For that application it has worked really well and it's a lot easier to integrate with software that spams log or alert data.

Mumble in combination with XMPP is the most hassle free and low resource option. Just for small personal use snikket.org XMPP is probably the best.

Matrix Synapse also works, but if you join any large rooms it will blow up ram and storage space usage, thus I can't really recommend it.

I run ejabberd for myself and my family/friend and use conversations on android. Mattermost I would say is the most like discord. I run one of those as well and love it.

To echo what others have said, I’ve been running a personal/friends only matrix server for about a year, and have found it, though difficult at first, to be stable enough to use as a universal messenger combining discord, messenger, WhatsApp and others in one app. It’s very convenient.

I'm running a mumble and a conduit server currently, and I'm not planning to ever touch shitcord again ^^

I run a single user matrix instance to join some chat rooms. Works great for me.

There was a post recently about this. It was called revolt

I run a non-federated Matrix server for my family with synapse, it's behind nginx and the setup is pretty straightforward if you know what you're doing. It does chat, voice, and video with screenshare nicely, though I don't know now well it scales to a large group.

I've been running a synapse server for a few years using https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

I'd highly recommend the above Ansible playbook as it makes it easy to manage not only synapse but also to manage a bunch of bridges and bots if you have the need for them. I have a bunch of rooms that are bridged to Slack for my bozo friends that refuse to use a cool open-source alternative.

I do. I've been hosting it for 3 years now. I have seen them add new features rapidly, and it's pretty exciting, things can (rarely) break sometimes (cause you didn't read the upgrade notes before upgrading).

They had something called communities, which they scrapped for Spaces. Spaces are more akin to a server on Discord for the most part. I don't use Discord too much, so there could be some features missing that I have not noticed.

I didn't intend to bring them to me, I intended to go to them using bridges. If you have a Discord server, investigate how to bridge to that discord server (either personally via double puppeting bridges or maintain a complete copy of the server using relay bridges). This way over time you can bring people over to your matrix instance cause these companies do mess up (at this point its not will its when). Similar with signal, googlechat etc.

It is fun and fairly easy.

I use Matrix too. I've hosted my own Synapse instance for almost a year now. It works great. Easy to maintain and upgrade.

Just found out about this recently. It's touted as an open source alternative.
Revolt Chat

I personally prefer a self - hosted Revolt instance. It's not federated or anything, but it's fast and nearly identical to Discord with some extra nice features, and it has a first party docker container so it's extremely easy to set up. I didn't go with Matrix or anything like that because it's harder to set up a natural system where you have a server, but then that server has many channels, and that's very important to how my friend group communicates and hangs out.

I've been hosting it for myself for a couple of years and once you set it up it's without problems. I wanted to consolidate all my chats like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc. into one UI and the bridges allow me to do that.

Discord has a proprietary license so I never considered it.

There is Spacebar (formerly Fosscord) aiming to be a drop-in discord-compatible replacement. I'm not sure how usuable it is yet, since I haven't gotten around to try it, but it does look like a promising solution imo.

Yeah, I'm hosting a Synapse instance; have been for a few years now. The biggest complication was the reverse proxy set-up, because I didn't want matrix in my handle. 😁 But they've got great docs around that (and more) these days; and there's a good community in the Synapse Admins room too.

I have been successfully hosting a Matrix instance (Synapse) for a few friends since January. Definitely a learning process but I have to say the docs are excellent. Reverse proxy and federation was a little bit tricky but has been working fine. I've also since migrated from a bare metal setup to a containerized one with very little hassle beyond understanding the basics of migrating the database, etc.

I have two synapse servers and jitsi instance with 3 bridges. Works fine for home and Corp usage.

I self-host a Synapse (Matrix) server on a VPS and it's been working great for well over a year now. I do so via Docker and it seems very stable.

Not sure if they do screen sharing but I've seen some buzz around 'revolt' recently which is self-hostable.

Check out rocket.chat

It is what my company uses. It is free and open source. Same features as Discord. Not too difficult to setup.

I would like to find an alternative as well . I mostly use one discord sever that the users would be happy to switch to a self hosted option.

I am running one as well, also have some bridges between protocols, Discord bridge being among them.

To maintain it is not very hard, appart one thing - database is blowing up constantly and it is a battle to keep it contained.

According to TS devs the screen sharing is comming Soon™ for TS5 but I can't promise it because it was originally planned for last year.

If you want a source I can search for it in german ts beta chat.

I've had a private Matrix server for me and a few family members for years now. It doesn't federate, and I'm afraid to try, because I run it on a potato computer and I've heard horror stories of Synapse federation consuming hundreds of gigabytes of space.

It's generally been stable and performant and really nice to use. The only problem is encryption: Element seems to forget keys sometimes and need to resync. And Matrix's whole e2ee system is arcane nonsense to anyone who's not extremely technical. Every time that happens, it's a long tech support call.

The solution is to just not use encryption on chatrooms, which is fine, but DMs have to be encrypted so it still comes up sometimes.