I’m looking into a few different chat servers, probably just for family on my tailnet.
I like the idea that simplex allows video chat. My server is a repurposed optiplex 3060so I think it should be able to handle it. Is anyone doing this? Do you think it’s worth it?
Should I be considering other options like XMPP?
Every one always says XMPP and there were a lot of recommendations for ejabberd. I tried this recently and it was a total disaster, I do not have a working chat server. If I followed the docker instructions the server would just crash with no details of what went wrong. Where it should have been creating a default server config file it was instead creating a directory with the wrong permissions then promptly crashing. I tried following their documentation but after about 6 hours of messing about and adding more and more I still couldn’t get a client to login to it. I have no idea how to make this work.
So whatever the solution ultimately is I can’t recommend Ejabberd.
Ejabberd is definitly for more advanced users, but you can usually get help over at joinjabber.org (which has a webclient that you can use without an xmpp account).
But yes, Snikket and Prosody is easier to set up.