Chat application thoughts?

[YurkshireLad]

Which of the chat applications (Rocket, Matrix, Mattermost) do you prefer? Which is the most lightweight with the best mobile app support? It's not obvious to me which of them get their account information or authentication from the Cloudron installation.

[girish]

• Mattermost - does not have LDAP. It also has no access control as such, it works best if you know everyone who you invite and they can be expected to follow "rules" (for example, I think in mm anyone can archive a channel)

• Rocket.Chat - has LDAP. Also has live chat which you can embed on your site. This is what we use and it's acceptable. Mobile app breaks now and then

• Matrix - Has e2e encryption, open standard. If you prefer open standard over maturity, you should choose this over rocket.chat.

While both Rocket.Chat and Matrix support federation, I have only tested it with Matrix and it works well there.

[YurkshireLad]

Thanks. LDAP support and maturity are important. I don't need federation.

[marcusquinn]

@yurkshirelad Having put a bit of time into all 3 of these now I'd say Rocket.Chat.

The others still feel like work-in-progress and their mobile apps wouldn't impress a kid.

[atridad]

While I like Matrix/Synapse and I found the mobile experience ok. It definitely has some issues with performance and UI stuttering on both mobile and desktop use cases. Also it is quite RAM hungry if you wanna even think about joining popular rooms. I got to about 5GB on my instance and then gave up and went to rocket chat. What i dont like about rocket chat is connecting to their service for push notifications. Makes me nervous for a self hosted app. And Mattermost doesn't have LDAP. But if you use GitLab and use it for devs, you can use GitLab login which uses LDAP. So indirect LDAP?

[jdaviescoates]

@atrilahiji said in Chat application thoughts?:

What i dont like about rocket chat is connecting to their service for push notifications. Makes me nervous for a self hosted app.

I wonder if things like Apprise and Gotify could be used to roll our own?

I think I've also seen mentions of people adding their own Rocket.Chat apps to Google Play Store and then using those notifications instead.

[yusf]

RocketChat seems the most viable candite for non-federated deployments. One huge disadvantage of Matrix+Element currently is that Element does not support multiple accounts. This of course disincentives using multiple Matrix identities, limiting it's use.

rocket chat is connecting to their service for push notifications

Doesn't all 3 clients do this? Using app store apps will always be a bottleneck for control, unfortunately.

[fbartels]

@jdaviescoates said in Chat application thoughts?:

I wonder if things like Apprise and Gotify could be used to roll our own?

https://docs.rocket.chat/guides/administrator-guides/notifications/push-notifications explains how to not use their push gateway

@yusf said in Chat application thoughts?:

Doesn't all 3 clients do this?

Yes pretty much everybody does this. the reason is that you rely on notification infrastructure of your mobile phone os for battery saving notifications. (without the Apple and Google push services applications would need to poll for updates every so often). And to use these push services one needs to create an account, keys, etc which is often too complicated for the casual users.

@yusf said in Chat application thoughts?:

Using app store apps will always be a bottleneck for control, unfortunately.

One more reason for the use and development of Progressive Web App. Webapplications can actually self register for notifications (https://github.com/notify-run/notify.run does this for example) and pwas make you also independent from app stores.

Take the Kopano Meet app in the Cloudron appstore for example. When you visit this in e.g. Chrome, Firefox, Edge it will prompt you if you want to install it. Once its "installed" you have an icon just like with every other app on your phone/laptop/desktop. Opening it will open a browser without the usual decoration. And when you update the Meet app on Cloudron, then the installed app will automatically update to the state from your server on the next restart.

[subven]

Mattermost kinda sucked because the community ("Team") version had no system default permission policy and even if configured through config files, permissions were not applied. This means that everyone was able to, lets say...do things that you would not expect at all. See https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/14104 for example. I think they fixed some issues around that, but it tarnishes the shine of what could actually be a good open source project.

rocket.chat was the best alternative but even if the mobile client got better, the product got worse over time. Lately they kinda forced you into using their cloud service in order to have (limited) push notifications working in the future. Federation is still in beta and not ready for production. After using it for the last 1 1/2 years, I have mixed feelings.

Synapse (Matrix) + Element has clearly proven to be the best solution. I saw a lot of big players move away from Slack and HipChat towards Matrix. Element is pretty good (at least at Desktop) and there are a lot of other mobile clients too. Usability and security is top-notch and except that it is a bit difficult to set up (unless you use cloudron), I saw no real downsides.

I would be very happy to replace Telegram and rocket.chat with Matrix but people are known to be sluggish.

[jdaviescoates]

@subven said in Chat application thoughts?:

Usability and security is top-notch

Lots of people find the usability of Martix an issue. It's often not at all obvious how to find/ join rooms.

[yusf]

Yes, speaking form experience and an admin POV Element usability for selfhosted homeservers is definitely not top-notch (but improving).

[murgero]

@girish said in Chat application thoughts?:

If you prefer open standard over maturity

Common misconception that open source / open standard does not equal maturity. OpenSSL is open standard on 90% of webservers in the world, and it's very secure and mature.

[mehdi]

@murgero nobody said these 2 qualities were incompatible. I think nobody here holds this position ^^
The point here was that Matrix was more open but less mature.
Not at all that it's impossible to be both open and mature, just that it wasn't the case in this specific instance.

[murgero]

@mehdi oh yeah that makes sense >.<

[marcusquinn]

I've just been taking another look at Nextcloud Talk, and I have to say that both the web application and the mobile app are excellent.

Unlike Element and Mattermost, Talk has the ability to add multiple servers, which is essential for me in managing multiple companies and clients. Plus, it is already using the Nextcloud LDAP integration for Cloudron user management.

I haven't tried the Matterbridge yet but the concept does look very good and might tick all your boxes for ease of onboarding and security:

• https://nextcloud.com/de/blog/bridging-chat-services-in-talk/
• https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/talk_matterbridge

Highly recommend revisiting and including this in your consideration.

[doodlemania2]

@marcusquinn on the Talk front, we're packaging Nextcloud Talk High Performance Backend, so you should be able to scale up nicely soon(ish)

[marcusquinn]

@doodlemania2 Ooooooo - that is nice! Owe you many

[jdaviescoates]

@doodlemania2 said in Chat application thoughts?:

@marcusquinn on the Talk front, we're packaging Nextcloud Talk High Performance Backend, so you should be able to scale up nicely soon(ish)

I'm really looking forward to that!

[murgero]

@marcusquinn said in Chat application thoughts?:

Unlike Element and Mattermost, Talk has the ability to add multiple servers, which is essential for me in managing multiple companies and clients. Plus, it is already using the Nextcloud LDAP integration for Cloudron user management.

I assume you mean the ability to login to multiple servers given the context? I believe element supports this. Mattermost does not sadly.

[marcusquinn]

@murgero said in Chat application thoughts?:

I assume you mean the ability to login to multiple servers given the context? I believe element supports this. Mattermost does not sadly.

Yup, and stay logged in to get notifications from all servers and easily switch between the two.

[doodlemania2]

@jdaviescoates It's up next as soon as I finish cleaning paperlessng and submitting (today hopefully). You can follow along on my https://git.cloudron.io/doodlemania2/nthpbe

[bubonicfred]

@subven You can sponser them on github for like 5-10 bucks a month for more push notifications (which still work without paying, but with a cap) much cheaper than the cloud option, especially if you only need the push notifications

[Mastadamus]

I've tried element/matrix and now rocket.chat. I find rocket.chat to be lightyears easier on administration/moderation then matrix. Admin rocket.chat is borderline enjoyable. Admin matrix was not. Additionally, the users i've talked to about ease of use (caveat only about 10) all preferred rocket hands down to element. Lastly, Rocket has the dankest GIFS.

[robi]

@mastadamus but no dark mode ;-/

[marcusquinn]

@robi everything has dark-mode if you use darkreader.org or webcatalog.app. I've not found an app yet it doesn't work as well or better than an apps own dark styling.

[robi]

@marcusquinn rocket chat, desktop app.

[marcusquinn]

@robi Didn't know there was one. I'm guessing it's an Electron wrapper like almost every other "app" nowadays? In which case, I already roll my own with WebCatalog for the extra features.