Hi,
Trying to move group chat from telegram to a more private option, but the key feature is its web interface which is so convenient…
I’ve checked SimpleX, Session, Briar & Element-Matrix, but the first 3 do not have a web version and the latest only has a free version for self-hosting and I haven’t looked into self-hosting yet.
I’d completely understand if what I’m looking for doesn’t exist for free, but if anyone has a suggestion here, I’m interested!
Cheers
Element/matrix does indeed have a web version. You can use https://app.element.io, or you can self host the web client.
I think Element does what you’re looking for. Get yourself a fediverse account, log in and watch it go. Difficulty, as ever, is getting your contacts to switch.
It is federated, just with other Matrix protocol servers. Just like how email is federated.
Being federated isn’t the same as living in the same Fediverse. You can upvote a Lemmy post from Mastodon since they both use ActivityPub but you can’t do that with a Matrix account. There are a couple of different ActivityPub-like generalized protocols out there, but none of them are near the size of ActivityPub & Lemmy is ActivityPub so for all intents & purposes for this conversation the Fediverse here (& most places) is ActivityPub. Matrix is on an entirely different federated network & they aren’t related.
Just because those two got mentioned: Element/Matrix and Jitsi are not E2EE out of the box. You need to set it up.
Element is default E2EE for 1-to-1 direct messaging. Rooms require setting up encryption.
matrix has a web interface and there’s many different options for clients. https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
there’s also signal but idk if that will suit your needs
there is revolt that is like discord but it is open source. downside is it is not e2ee
Movim v0.28 released within the last 24 hours. It has a web UI (that is optimized for both large & small viewports), E2EE via OMEMO, OTR, or PGP (but users can choose native clients if they wish). With the NLNet funding they are extending to full video conferencing + compatibility with the Dino native GTK client. Subjectively, it looks pretty sharp for a web client. You can also use it to share ‘posts’ for announcements & public feed aggregation—something a group chat should never be used for (announcements & other long-term messages get lost in the black hole search can’t find & unreleated posts all around it with messy-to-follow threads since this sort of content isn’t supposed to be chat).
It’s not quite as easy as services.movim.enable = true for NixOS but the NixOS module isn’t far off once an XMPP server has been selected with optimized defaults beyond standard setup—& the option I would personally recommend for self-hosting as declarative config is easier to work with in the long run, but there are non-Nix options. Being PHP, it’s fairly performant as well as not being built on some space-wasting, RAM-sucking ‘eventual consistency’ model that will cost you out the ass (which is Matrix, by design). The front-end, being mostly vanilla JS, is not using some heavy, bloaty framework. This will meet all your needs & not require expensive hardware host even on an old laptop at home or part of a multi-purpose server (does not need dedicated hardware).
