HACKER Q&A
📣 throwaway81523

What FOSS self-hosted chat programs do you recommend? Text/voice/video


I've been using Nextcloud, which is not that great. The text chat interface is confusing, installation was painful last time I did it, and the voice and video parts were hard to get working on my laptop. IIRC the Android phone app didn't work for chat. I don't know whether there is an iPhone app, so in either case, I haven't tried it.

I'd be using this mostly to talk to family, including my mom who is quite elderly and is thrown off a lot by interface elements changing, fonts changing, etc. IRC is really better than any web chat app I know of, except it doesn't keep scrollback when the client is disconnected. It is important to be able to use text and video at the same time, since her hearing is poor so it's better to type text that she can read.

My mom uses a Debian laptop that I set up for her, so if there's a Linux desktop app that's better than the web interface, that's great. She doesn't use mobile phones at all. I could imagine mobile apps also being worthwhile though, for users other than my mom. My sister uses an iPhone so the availability of an iPhone app would be nice.

I've tried the hosted version of Jitsi Meet (meet.jit.si) and it was nice. I haven't tried self-hosting it yet. I'm happy to hear about experiences, and also about anything else interesting that is out there.

Thanks!


  👤 lax4ever Accepted Answer ✓
Chat program: Rocket Chat

NextCloud is a cloud solution I found relatively easy to set up and host but I only really use it for file sharing

Video Chatting: Jitsi. I haven't set up my own instance, but it has worked well for me all the times that I have needed it.

All three come with web interfaces, so no app is needed but RC does have a desktop app.