Matrix seems the way to go, it's generally considered part of the fediverse (even though it's not participating in activitypub)
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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What makes it part of the fediverse then?
It’s FOSS and decentralized/supports self hosting, plus has a large following in fediverse circles so it gets colloquially lumped in
Does it have similar functionality to discord? I looked into signal but it’s basically just group chat and there’s no way to organize subtopics so it’s not too useful for what I want to do.
Yes, Matrix has spaces to organize related rooms.
Ask them what they mean by "FediVerse." I don't know of any ActivityPub chat room software; while there could be one, trying to make a real-time interactive chat with AP seems like hammering a square peg into a round hole.
Matrix is probably the best alternative. It's just as federated as Mastodon is. Here's a reasonably brief, fairly accurate layman comparison of the two protocols, although the write up is for an unrelated topic.
If the concern is that the person wants full integration with the many different projects that provide AP integration, then there's at least one Matrix bridge for ActivityPub. Honestly, it seems like a kind of horrible idea ... like, how would an IRC chat room (IRC ~ Matrix ~ Discord ~ Slack) look like in a Lemmy client? It's even a little awkward when Lemmy content shows up in Mastodon, and vice-versa. The more the UX flow diverges, the more weirdness you see in the federation.
What would this even look like? Could you follow a Mastodon account from a chat room? And would that account's toots just randomly show up with no context in the room? Would people responding in Mastodon automatically get sucked into the room, or would the Mastodon user look like they're having a conversation you see only one side of? And would people replying to the person show up in Toots?
Anyway, Matrix is probably the best federated solution for chat, at the moment. You have one account and can join rooms on any server, or connect to any user on any other Matrix server.
you didn't even mention xmpp
Unfortunately no-one does. Since Google basically killed it, it gets ignored everywhere.
i don't think that's the reason, there are just too many clients availabe and too many inconsistencies between them. aside from that i don't think there is a really good one for ios and no go to solution for all platforms in general.
but please correct me, if i'm wrong, i'd be really happy if there was an easierway into xmpp especially for non technical users. matrix does a better job at that even if there is the problem with metadata protection.
another reason to mention matrix, but not xmpp is the easier handling of he concept of an audio call room. for this reason i was also surprised ro see IRC mentioned here.
I didn't mention a lot of things, for various reasons.
Like GP said, once Google killed XMPP compatibility, it lost a lot of luster, but I was using it long before Google Chat added integration and I mainly remember fighting with it a lot. Maybe it's improved through extensions, but when I left it:
- Group chat was weak. It exists, but I've never encountered large, persistent group chats in the wild.
- There was no server side message caching; if you weren't online, you couldn't get messages
- There was no message syncing. If you used multiple devices, you received messages only on the active one(s?).
- Feature support varied wildly between servers, and you were never sure what you could use with any given contact
- Encryption support was spotty and an after-thought.
A lot of this isn't relevant to group chats, but the lack of history syncing was a big one, and is also one of my main objections to IRC.
Speaking of IRC, it may be possible that with the right combination of clients and servers you can address these, but IM recent E with IRC it lacks some QOL features, some of which are, for me, minimum requirements.
- The history thing. If I go offline and come back, all conversation since I last logged out is unavailable.
- It lacks basic support for message editing. There's the
s//convention, but it's handled client side (or by a bot), and it's only a convention and not a spec - There's just a lot of creature comfort stuff that's certainly not absolutely necessary, but which makes modern IRC less pleasant to use, and for some teams, deal breakers. Channel level file attachments. Inline images. /react, /reply ... just a bunch of convenience things that are either only supported by some clients and so discouraged, or just not there.
But the main thing is that it's not federated. It may look like it is, but that's only IRC clients letting you connect to multiple servers at the same time. You have to have accounts on each server - there's no ID sharing. If there's any channel message syncing, it's done through bots, and requires collaboration on both servers. OP specifically asked for federated solutions, and IRC isn't.
Currently hosting XMPP:
- Group chat appears to be much better now
- Server-side caching exists now, at least in ejabberd
- Syncing also exists now, see above
As for encryption and feature support, YMMV, https://providers.xmpp.net/ has a list of servers that provide everything.
Thanks!!
Do you have, or have you seen, any use of XMPP groups for IRC/Matrix/Discord/Slack like cases? Large, persistent groups that anyone can join without invite (with just an address eg on a web page)?
Matrix does the job okay'ish.
The "ish" is doing championship levels of lifting there
Indeed. I wonder why people market it as an alternative since it has way less functionality. I mean, I'm a fan but link previews suck and threads are buggy. A chat/productivity app shouldn't be that hard. Just considering it all, why not use Lemmy as an alternative?
XMPP or IRC?
Are those part of the fediverse? I've used matrix in the past, but have no experience with xmpp or irc I don't want to scare them with something complicate.
No, although XMPP is similarly federated to the fediverse. If by fediverse you mean ActivityPub, then XMPP and IRC are both much older than AP.
They're from a good while before, and I'm not sure it would be appropriate for your use case.
Matrix is much closer to the Slack / Discord format. It IS a bit more complicated than those two, especially if you're self hosting it, but it has a lot of similar functionality
The fediverse as most people on here would reference that term, isn't really designed for what you're looking for.
Matrix effective is what you're looking for. The only alternative to that would be something like TeamSpeak 6, which is a closed federated chat system (that's still not really fully baked).
Are you willing to set up your own thing I recomend Mattermost. https://mattermost.com/
It's open source, but I wouldn't call it a fediverse alternative. But it's still a good slack alternative.