Yeah I have the same issue.

The matrix protocol is a tremendous mess

He's already talking to that machine of his that censors his drunken ramblings with cute little asterisks. I wonder what does that do to someone's psyque tho.

Could you build an interface on top of it to look exactly like discord with all of it’s functions?

In theory yes, and Movim is movim' in that direction (yeah I invented that pun, blame me). That's part of the trick with XMPP, it's quite extensible.

I'm not sure about Fluxer specifically, but I've seen Zulip being deployed as a self-contained chat room for a few projects now. Also Stoat claims to be a Discord replacement. What does Fluxer offer in particular that the other two don't?

I was under the impression that plutonium on my server would be controlled by me. Say, if I wanted to give it away, I could. At least, that's what I've read.

Do you use features like permissions, channels, threads, bots, ... a lot ?

Application using xmpp as a backend are great and can be all you need if you just want a simple voice/text chat with no additional features.

There is no equivalent to most "server/community" features of discord in the xmpp protocol, and it is something that needs to be implemented at that level for it to work.

ah we don't really use those features much. as long as we can hang out and chat as a friend group, we're good

Whether or not XMPP is a Signal or a Discord replacement is dependant on the client.

For a Discord replacement, there is the Movim XMPP client, which has group audio/video calls, screensharing (w/audio using chromium based browser), support for gifs and videos within the chat, and very soon Discord-like servers with rooms, after which the dev plans to work on drop-in voice chat rooms.

What was your secret to get it working? I've been trying to get it running for 2 weeks following the official guide. I'm able to create an admin user via the CLI, but when I try to go to any of the subdomains I've created, I either get a 404 or the TLS handshake fails to complete. The people behind ESS are very clear that they do not offer any support and I haven't been able to find an answer to this problem anywhere.

My parents in their 70's are alright daily driving gajim there

That there's no shortage of wheels being reinvented, and that it takes insights developed over decades to be relevant in this field. To avoid.

Seems to me that those are generally enabled by bots and scripting, and I don't think it's any harder to do that stuff in XMPP than it is in discord?

Ok, so that sounds like either a DNS issue or a reverse proxy issue. Did you configure your domain/subdomains to point to the public IP address of where you're setting things up? Are you using the reverse proxy in the guide or do you already have a reverse proxy and you're adding ESS domains to it? Did you configure port forwarding on your router?

I have had issues with accessing my locally hosted services via domain name while on the same network. My router doesn't like to route internal traffic back to its own WAN port. Can you access it from something on a different network (cellular data)?

Sorry for the delayed response, things have been wildly busy for me.

I did configure my domains as instructed, and they do resolve to the expected IP address. I don't have an already existing reverse proxy, so I was just following along with what the guide was telling me to do. That said, this may be the issue, because I don't recall seeing any specific set up for the included reverse proxy and I've been through that guide 3 times. I haven't configured port forwarding on my router since I'm using a Hetzner VPS for this, but I did make sure to open up the required ports on the firewall.

Alright that gives me a good idea what your working with.

I am running it along side some other projects, so I already had a reverse proxy set up, so I didn't look closely at the other parts of the guide in that section.

If you want to be able to use this server for other hosting in the future, you may want to set up a reverse proxy. I can give some advice about that if you're interested!

In your case, if the only thing you ever want to host on this box is Matrix, you don't need a reverse proxy. You should be able to do the steps here and it should result in a working deployment.

It looks like that should give you a tls.yaml file, which you need to include when issuing the helm command to deploy everything. This one:

helm upgrade --install --namespace "ess" ess oci://ghcr.io/element-hq/ess-helm/matrix-stack -f ~/ess-config-values/hostnames.yaml <optional additional values files to pass> --wait

You need to make sure that in the section, you include:

-f ~/ess-config-values/tls.yaml

So your command would be this, if you have no additional yaml files, and if you do, simply put "-f path/to/file" at the end, right before the "--wait":

    helm upgrade --install --namespace "ess" ess oci://ghcr.io/element-hq/ess-helm/matrix-stack -f ~/ess-config-values/hostnames.yaml -f ~/ess-config-values/tls.yaml --wait

Also, the way to include additional config files tripped me up like crazy for a good few hours, and then how to format them tripped me up for even longer, for options they don't have examples for (like automatically joining any new accounts to a room, for example).

If you've got specific options you're trying to set, I'm happy to help if I can. The documentation is atrocious for this bit, so if you're not a kubernetes pro (I am definitely not) it is confusing!

Thanks for your help! It's very much appreciated. I was thinking I might want to use this VPS for an occasional OwnCast stream and as a SyncThing target, so it sounds like I'll need a reverse proxy. Any recommendations on something relatively easy to use? I've seen people mention ngnix, traefik, caddy and a few others, but I'm not sure which would integrate nicely with ESS. Also, I appreciate the heads up about the helm commands. Definitely important info to have!

You're welcome!

I use https://nginxproxymanager.com/ for my reverse proxy. It doesn't exactly integrate with ESS, but it's not super challenging to set up proxy hosts for the domains (you can specify multiple domain names in one Proxy Host if they all point to the same host/port).

I find it nice because I can manage it via a web portal, but it's on my home LAN. Depending on how you access your VPS this might be less convenient than using one of the other options, but I don't have much experience with the others.

I set up Let's Encrypt certs to automatically renew for the Matrix domains, pointed them all at the ESS host server and port, and then enabled Websockets Support. That last bit is critical, or things will simply not work correctly, especially calls.

I'll review the docs and give this a shot either this evening or tomorrow. Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction!

XMPP is just the protocol, you can create a client which looks like any proprietary alternative like Discord (fluux tries to have the same look for example)

Movim is IMO the best alternative using XMPP and it's adding more and more features the last weeks stay tuned! see here

With this kind of mentality, nobody will ever migrate and one will have to deal with Discord's horrible terms and conditions

The only alternative is to willingly leave over a hundred communities, some of which I have strong ties to, and never interact with the majority again.

That’s a big ask.