It’s not as snazzy as Discord but it’s fully open-source and federated. So everyone can run their own server (I do, too). If you don’t care about running your own you can just sign up at https://app.element.io/ . It’s free of course. It basically is for chat what lemmy and mastodon are to social media.
It also offers many “bridges” to other protocols, like WhatsApp, Telegram, even Discord. Those are not quite as mature and mostly third-party provided but they generally work well.
There’s a really great ansible playbook for installing your own. If you would like to have the full bridged experience, beeper is probably best.
Thanks! I’ll have to see if there’s Docker containers available. Ansible is definitely doable too, but I prefer Docker. I’ll stick it on the same server I’m running Lemmy and Mastodon on :)
Yeah for sure. I run the server + a bunch of bridges (whatsapp, signal, telegram, chatgpt) on an old atom NUC with 8GB RAM and it only actually uses 2 GB.
I can really recommend it. It takes some reading to set it up because it’s insanely configurable. But in the end I have a config file with like 20 statements in it and that sets it all up and keeps it up to date.
In other words: Matrix.
I’ve never tried Matrix but I’ve heard good things about it.
It’s not as snazzy as Discord but it’s fully open-source and federated. So everyone can run their own server (I do, too). If you don’t care about running your own you can just sign up at https://app.element.io/ . It’s free of course. It basically is for chat what lemmy and mastodon are to social media.
It also offers many “bridges” to other protocols, like WhatsApp, Telegram, even Discord. Those are not quite as mature and mostly third-party provided but they generally work well.
There’s a really great ansible playbook for installing your own. If you would like to have the full bridged experience, beeper is probably best.
Thanks! I’ll have to see if there’s Docker containers available. Ansible is definitely doable too, but I prefer Docker. I’ll stick it on the same server I’m running Lemmy and Mastodon on :)
Actually the ansible playbook creates a bundle of docker containers so you get the best of both :)
Ahh… Interesting!
Do you know how much RAM it needs? I have a spare VPS with 9GB RAM - is that sufficient? I could run it in a VM on my home server instead, too.
Yeah for sure. I run the server + a bunch of bridges (whatsapp, signal, telegram, chatgpt) on an old atom NUC with 8GB RAM and it only actually uses 2 GB.
Here’s the documentation for the playbook: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
I can really recommend it. It takes some reading to set it up because it’s insanely configurable. But in the end I have a config file with like 20 statements in it and that sets it all up and keeps it up to date.