Hi all,
I run a private self-hosted Synapse server with bridges for:
- Signal
- Doscord
- IRC
- Google Voice
- Custom APIs
I am thinking of switching to XMPP. Can anyone recommend a good Docker-based server and transport combo that I could test out?
I’m looking at tuwunel to setup instead of synapse as soon as it’s ready. Still matrix, but maybe better for small instances.
I’ve been considering setting up matrix or xmpp, can I ask what is motivating you to switch?
Overall I’ve been happy with Matrix (private not federated), but it’s very convoluted. Whenever anything goes wrong it’s really difficult to figure out why, as there is a lot of complexity. And once you set something up, it’s really hard if not impossible to make a change.
For instance, since it’s built for federation, changing the URL is impossible.
So I’d like to try out XMPP since it’s much more lightweight and simple. I may not switch, but want to explore.
I’m in this same boat as well. As someone who ran an XMPP server in the past, then stopped and eventually moved onto Matrix. I have to hard agree, in my experiences, XMPP was so much better administration side than having to deal with matrix, and its quite a bit more fleshed out(not to mention the sheer amount of clients available) Being able to just log into a management panel and have the panel do everything administration wise for me was super nice, instead of having to ask “is this only available via the API or is it available via a client or is this config only”, these types of tools from what I’ve seen don’t really exist for matrix.
perhaps a stupid question, but are there bridges for XMPP ? My impression is that XMPP is as good as empty (I do use it mainly as a federated service). Is there still a lot of active development on the XMPP side of things?
I do not understand your point with ‘you cannot change the URL’. If you use matrix as non-federated and just the only user, what is the problem that you need to change the URL when you need to set up a new server on a new URL? Not being able to change the server at the same URL seems like a logical concequence of authentication, be it for server-to-server communication as for client-to-server communication.
Yes they are called “transports”.
As for when I tried to change the URL, I was moving all services from publicly resolvable DNS to
.lan, and Matrix is an issue because you can’t change that after the fact, even if you haven’t federated.Yes there are gateways (or transports) for xmpp. See for example https://slidge.im/ but there are also a few other projects.
It’s maybe a bit less than for Matrix, but the ones that exist tend to work better.
The Signal gateway has currently issues, due to Signald being broken.
For WhatsApp and Discord there is Slidge.
IRC works great with Biboumi.
I am not aware of a Google voice bridge, but there are ways to bridge to the regular phone network and sms. The easiest is the https://jmp.chat/ service.
How is signald broken? I’m using it with Matrix now just fine.
I think you can’t connect new devices or so and the development has stalled. But I don’t use Signal personally, so not 100% sure. AFAIK the Matrix bridge is currently being rewritten with another backend.
Is it worth swapping from snikket? Seemed to ve an easier way to get prosody
Since you’ve used both, how do ejabberd and prosody compare to another? I was going to go with the former.
Ejabberd has more enterprise features and scales better for large public servers, Prosody has more interesting community modules and generally is ideal for smaller private servers (but has a very nice invite system).
@2xsaiko A big caveat is that I used them in very different time frames - prosody starting from 2021 to now, while ejabberd I used from 2006 to 2012 or so. At the time I used it, ejabberd’s config was done in erlang(!); they apparently they’ve since switched to yaml configs. It was generally fine, but when I switched back to XMPP in 2021, I figured I’d go with a server in a less niche language and better support (the jmp.chat folks mostly use & recommend snikket/prosody).
@2xsaiko XMPP is nice and lightweight, so I think either would work fine. I just find prosody has more community momentum.
It was matrix that was a massive memory hog, required running bleeding-edge homeserver software, didn’t do proper security support, etc, so that’s where I have stronger feelings.
Prosody is probably your best bet. It’s modular, easily configurable and is basically fully compliant with the XMPP specification. For your bridges however, I’d reccomend not going fully into XMPP because there are very little bridges available for it. As for dockerization, apparently they are not currently updating their dockerfiles, so this is another thing to take into account.
The Prosody docker images are basically https://snikket.org/ which is developed by one of the Prosody developers.
But Ejabberd also has good Docker containers.
Unfortunately the whole point of my system is bridges/transports. I don’t even use Matrix itself, I use it as a centralized messenger.
Or Slidge
Promising, would need to supplement GV and Signal, but this gets me halfway there, thanks.
Maybe try Matterbridge
Doesn’t matter bridge work by “adding a user” to rooms, vs just your user?
It’s distributed through standard package managers, it would be trivial to create a Dockerfile to make your own container.
snikket is prosody’s little sister. docker ready
What’s your docker compose for all of that? I would be interested in running that stack.
You should check out docker-compose-viz or dockge for visualizing/managing these complex setups - I’ve been using them for my audiobookshelf server (which I access with the soundleaf app) and it’s been a lifesaver for managing all those interconnected containers.
