You must have used a very outdated client (like Pidgin) because history is syncronized via the server reliably since 10+ years on xmpp with clients that support the MAM standard.

The servers are great, but the currently available clients are only great for non-corporate usecases IMHO.

Xmpp works great for 1:1 chats and small private groups, but there isn’t really an enterprise team chat client for it. Recently some promising projects came up trying to change that, but they are still too new to be serious contenders for that usecase specifically. Maybe in 1-2 years the situation will be different.

I mean good that you are interested in hosting a proxy, but Nginx Proxy Manager hides away a lot of features and is probably not such a good idea to use when you want to run more complex and security relevant apps like a Signal proxy.

I know this is a bit annoying as an answer, but learning a bit of regular Nginx is probably the better idea in the long run as you usually outgrow NPM quickly.

Fedidb does that for instances, but not individual communities. Might be easy to add though.

No, they rebranded LiveKit, which is open source but afaik developed by a silicon valley startup.

A Snikket server is cool.

Navidrome maybe, but Jellyfin also works for music.

If you switch to the dns-01 challenge you can just generate the certs on multiple servers hasselfree. And as a bonus you can get wildcard certs for subdomains.

Get the one with the newer SoC. The smaller one is waaay to slow (same as Librem5).

Most microblogging platforms actually don’t artificially limit the amount you can write, unlike Mastodon, so they can also work for macro-blogging.

Maybe overkill, but Peertube can definitely do that well.

Your server might have been hacked. There was a recent issue with a NodeJS software injecting a cryptominer onto other peoples servers, but I forgot the exact details.

ATProto isn’t federated or decentralized in any meaningful way.

What people say about Synapse is also somewhat outdated. These days it isn’t actually that much worse than Conduit (or forks), the main issue is that when you start joining older and bigger rooms the resource use goes through the roof, and that is also a problem with Conduit etc. Ultimately, this is a protocol issue and not an implementation issue.

There are multiple good XMPP mobile apps for Android: https://joinjabber.org/docs/apps/

The story on iOS is somewhat less good right now, but Monal is ok and Movim works quite well as a PWA in Safari.

Apparently a rebranded LiveKit, which is developed by an US American company…

XMPP is generally nicer to host due to lower resource requirements and better server management in general. The mobile apps are also more snappy and need much less battery, plus notifications are more reliable.

Matrix has somewhat more public rooms of FOSS projects you can join, but typically these projects are also available on IRC, which you can join via the excellent Biboumi gateway for XMPP.

That can be also done with a Slidge gateway for Discord on XMPP.

As others have said already, email is one of the few things I would avoid self-hosting.

You could check with your domain / DNS host if they also offer email. OVH for example gives a free 5GB email for every domain. Otherwise there are of course email providers that let you use your own domain.

You are funny. That article links directly to what media typically refers to, i.e. “mass media”.

Ask any typical person around you what they understand if you talk about “the media”, and they will confirm that this indeed refers to what I am talking about.

The “social” qualifier is a direct reference to how normal media is a one way street and how publishing is only open to a selected few and that is what sets “social media” apart from it.