[Zacharias030]

I recently switched a bunch of friends from a project-oriented whatsapp chat to self-hosted mattermost, because I wanted permanent storage for messages and attachments, and threads, and did not want to pay slack in perpetuity.

I feel that this idea is now in jeopardy, if I understand the 10k message history is the limit correctly.

And there I thought I had a solution to slowly bring over project channels, family related things etc. that was as reliable as "my linux box will be reachable on the public internet" and I am willing to manage that it does.

Seems I was wrong, but I don't know which other software has better future proofing.

[xethos]

So I guess it's my turn today to start the holy war. If Whatsapp was enough, but you want it to live on your Linux box, Matrix will do just fine. self-hosting has been fast, responsive, low-maintenance, and easy for me over the past several years.

They're trusted by multiple government agencies to stick around and treat their users reasonably, and there are a plethora of clients to choose from.

Now I'll step to the side for the next person to tear me down and sell you on XMPP.

[SubiculumCode]

Given that I've been using a self hosted Mattermost for 6+ years, I haven't heard of either Matrix.or XMPP...so will now need to look these up.

[xethos]

The next guy's job is to tell you XMPP is lighter, gen-er-ally viewed as simpler, with a wide array of clients and servers, optional encryption, and with a longer history (with that being viewed as rhyming with reliable).

My "job" in this holy-war thread is to tell you Matrix has become lighter over time, the "default" server Synapse has less, but IMO more up-to-date documentation with a real corporation behind keeping it up-to-date and useful, has a blossoming ecosystem of clients, servers, and bridges (allowing you to use it for other chat systems like Whatsapp and Telegram), has encryption being an enforced default for one-to-one mesasges (instead of XMPP's bolted-on after-the-fact extension), and a paid team to make Synapse more robust, reliable, lighter, faster, and more secure.

Take both arguments with a grain of salt, as I am biased as hell (to the point of donating a small amount monthly to Matrix, and starting flame wars like this one).

[Zacharias030]

Thank you xethos, this has been exactly the kind of opinion and experience report that I've been looking for.

the one thing I really want beyond persistent over whatsapp is threads. I hope matrix has a similarly trivial app/web/pc story as mattermost has, because the other users are not necessarily able to handle anything more complex than "download an app and sign in".

[Arathorn]

In theory https://element.io/en/download should provide an equivalent experience.

[Zacharias030]

I'll have a look into what the transfer story from mattermost->element looks like.