A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Hey, all.
Is it possible to skip this 'register your server' step when creating a self-hosted Rocketchat instance? I just don't want to, ya know? Regular websearching is just giving a lot about how to disable user registration rather than skipping the server registration with Rocketchat HQ.
what about an actually free alternative, like matrix + element?
I've set up a test server for matrix as well, wanted to compare to rocket since I see it mentioned a lot.
When I told a friend (the one I'd need on board to get the group of friends to use it) he said "does it have the gifs?" Matrix has a years-long enhancement request for native giphy support which is yet resolved. I dabbled with a giphy plugin with matrix and it worked alright, but I dunno if it was good enough to win my friends over.
I see. I'm an old fart and couldn't care less about gifs. But I do care about stuff being open instead of someone suddenly telling me the conditions have changed.
Element does the same without even asking.
I started toying with mattermost as well and then saw in the logs things going to "matteranalytics" or something like that... Shouldn't be too surprised, but seemed ironic since I looked it up to avoid the similar thing with rocket
These all have Venture Capital funding, so they need analytics to convince new buyers in the next funding round. Which is why is remains complex to opt out in Element/Matrix despite long being a user complaint.
This is BTW also why the user numbers of Matrix are so artificially inflated, it is basically an investor scam.
Only IRC and XMPP do not do this, as there is no financial incentive for it.