Self-Hosted Chat for Small Teams | Hacker News Reader

Self-Hosted Chat for Small Teams

sdelements.github.io

60 pointsthunderbong41 comments

Looks to not be that maintained/developed anymore (last commit oct 2019, no significant activity since 2017).

Has anyone tried this? From a cursory glance it seems to be superseded by Matrix/Riot (there's also Mattermost and RocketChat).

Yeah, looks dead:

> Is this project still alive?

> Sadly no, we've all been very busy at our company and haven't had the bandwidth to work on this thing.

From https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat/issues/781

We use Mattermost and are quite happy with it. It's free for the vast majority of use cases and open source. Runs great, rock solid stable, and has decent usable mobile apps.

I had problems receiving ios push notifications with their free version. Ended up switching back to slack.

Worked on this a bit years ago. Can confirm that it's no longer maintained. We eventually gave up and just moved over to Slack.

waves

pokes

Great work! Is being self-hosted something small teams are interested in, in your view?

For me, if I was part of a small team, I would choose a hosted service everytime so I don't need to do any ops work.

Some teams might have sensitive information that they don't want up somewhere they can't control.

Slack has also been banned in China at times.

We use mattermost and are super happy. It's like a full version of Slack for only $5/mo + 4h/yr maintenance. Didn't even see this one when we were looking.

Settled on Zulip to replace Jabber based system.

Rocket.chat, matrix/riot, mattermost, Zulip, and likely others were tried. Zulip's 'topics' (think threads) was the feature that put them ahead of every other system. Free push notifications were a plus as well.

If threading isn't important, check out Mattermost. If you're into federation, matrix is something to check out.

Check out rocketchat [0]. It has served us well.

[0] https://rocket.chat/

How is the performance so far? As MeteorJS, which rocketchat based on, has it’s own protocol for two-way communication.

I was excited to roll it out at the Linux Foundation. We are no longer rolling out new instances and Hyperledger[0] is looking for a replacement due to an issue[1][2].

[0] https://chat.hyperledger.org/

[1] https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/15583

[2] https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/15391

It has been fine for our use case. We have a few hundred users on it, but we only use it over our corporate network. We're running it in kubernetes and it scales up and down as needed.

A bit off-topic, but does anyone know of a good lightweight self-hosted CMS for small teams? Very basic spreadsheet/database, file hosting, shared document editing.

Privacy considerations mean cloud-hosted options are out. Open source or dirt cheap is better as it's for a non-profit with only a shoestring budget and voluntary contributors. Thanks.

No, but I've been thinking about it and you just inspired me to make a self-hosted Airtable like-system... See you in 2 years.

Something like Owncloud?

Would recommend NextCloud.

A Linux file share and Libre Office.

I would echo the Nextcloud suggestion! Their latest "Nextcloud Hub" [1] setup seems to offer exactly what you are looking for (including shared document editing via OnlyOffice).

1. https://nextcloud.com/hub/

It sounds like you're looking for Sandstorm[1], which is a thing I desperately wish I had an excuse to use.

[1] https://sandstorm.io/

Thanks to everyone for these very helpful replies.

Seafile

https://www.seafile.com/en/home/

Check out FileCloud Community Edition. You can self-host on windows or linux.

https://www.getfilecloud.com/filecloud-community-edition/

Let's Chat was one of the first apps we packaged for Cloudron. We used to use it as our full time chat for our customers. A great feature is that it has XMPP support (can connect using any XMPP client).

We have since moved on to Rocket.Chat. The main reason was that development stopped 2-3 years ago. Atleast back then, there was no mobile app as well

Discussed in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9040841

It's got a beautiful landing page, but I don't understand the key benefits over Slack.

Has any of the reasons for building it changed since you started the project in 2012?

I love Slack but if you get a big enough team you start losing messages quickly on the free tier to the void and it's expensive to upgrade. Stuff like this and Mattermost/RocketChat could be handy. Fling on a VM/Container Host of your choice and job's a good'un.

Also probably good if your company has to adhere to certain data security legislations keeping the instance firewalled and not giving data to Slack.

I first want to say I think companies should be paid for their services.

Everybody's first complaint is that history isn't preserved with Slack's free tier, but in practice it tends to enforce that those things should be in something more permanent and organized than chat.

At my workplace the main Slack-objection is ideological, on the grounds that we shouldn't be supporting a closed-source project when open-source options exist. But we're an ideological non-profit, so we're unusually aligned in this direction...

Given the current data handling practices I believe it might be appealing to many companies/individuals to keep as much in-house as possible.

True.

We keep mostly everything in-house, but team communication was the hardest part, as we wanted something that defaulted to end-to-end encryption. Surprisingly hard to beat Wire.com.

Ended up going with an XMPP server with OMEMO for encryption, and Jitsi Meet for video.

Original author here. I started the project in my early 20s when I had lots of free time. Slack didn't really exist back then and the other web based chat offerings weren't great (our company used Campfire).

I gradually stopped working on it as I got busier in both work and life. Part of me regrets not spinning it off as a company, especially after seeing RocketChat take off over the last couple years (we inspired them!).

It claims XMPP Multi-user chat (MUC) compatibility. Does that mean you can use random XMPP clients with it?

Yes

The claim is true.

Source: helped write it

Do you have plans to migrate to python 3 or it will stay as obsolate application?

is the development still ongoing? as it used to be abandoned for a while

It’s still unmaintained. We moved to slack, so unfortunately lost the incentive to continue maintaining it.

So like... IRC?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com