Misskey works like and is compatible with any Mastodon or similar Fediverse instance. Once registered you can subscribe to local and remote users and then only see their updates and not the firehose all feed as on the public landing page.

You don’t need a Misskey (or Sharkey) account to participate in Japanese language Fediverse discussions, however note that due to different CSAM related legislation quite a few larger Japanese Fediverse instances are defederated from western Mastodon etc. instances due to frequently shared “loli” illustrations on the former.

Yes, but that is wrong. It is all open-source and you can run an entirely unlimited version with any xmpp server yourself.

You can self-host it without any restrictions. The website is a bit unclear on that.

XMPP based https://prose.org/ might be an option, but it isn’t officially released yet (you can selfhost it though).

Snikket is definitly not harder to set up than Synapse or Condinuwuity, the difference is mainly that Matrix is based on standard web technology, so if you have some knowledge in that already, XMPP can feel a bit alien since it is an actual protocol different from http(s).

Movim is entirely different software indeed that even predates Conversations by a few years.

This is FUD (and I am getting really tired of this half-assed blog post being shared everywhere). The older OMEMO version used is not insecure. The newer version is better, yes, but it is an enhancement in regards to metadata protection, the core e2ee of the message body is unchanged and secure in both versions.

Nextcloud is a special case…

Snikket makes it quite easy, but the extra complexity of hosting from home is probably better avoided for total beginners.

Yes, Matrix is a bit ahead with SFU calls (after depending on Jitsi Meet for a long time, which uses xmpp under the hood). But for most usecases it doesn’t matter so much. On a modern internet connection a SFU basically only starts being useful in calls with ten or more participants. For corporate board meeting calls maybe, but your family call is also fine without.

There is no way sending free healthcare to foreign countries might backfire with the local population in the US, right?

For now voice and video calls in xmpp only lightly touch the server and are mostly p2p. This comes with some scaling issues but for small groups of around 5 people it works fine.

Movim is a bit special, for other clients it doesn’t matter much.

Movim specifically works a bit better with ejabberd, who also provide easy to use containers.

Prosody is more of a Lego set to build your own server, so I don’t think they even provided official container images for a long time. There is https://snikket.org/ though which is an opinionated distribution of Prosody with easy to use containers. Sadly Snikket doesn’t play so well with Movim out of the box.

In general it is probably easier to start out with a rented VPS. You can move to your own server later on when you got the basics down. Since XMPP servers are quite lightweight they run fine on low end VPS that can be rented for as little as 1€/month.

What would you need apps for? PWAs and pinned browser tabs work just the same. And also you can just use any other xmpp app with your Movim account.

Due to the architecture of Movim with parts of it running on the server a “proper” app wouldn’t make much sense. On the plus side this also means it is very lightweight in the browser, unlike JS heavy browser apps or Electron wrappers.

But since Movim is fully XMPP standard compliant, you can use a native XMPP Android app like Monocles Chat with the same account and have most features included in it as well.

You would be surprised how performant php7 and later has gotten 🤷

a fun built-in paint program to draw stuff into the chat

The main purpose is actually to easily annotate image uploads 😅

The problem is that “Discord” means something else for almost anyone and there is no alternative that 100% covers all the usecases.

For many public chats, IRC with a modern server and client is perfectly suitable, and for my private gaming sessions Mumble is as voice chat is doing fine even though friends are complaining that they can’t just use it in a browser.

For general IM stuff XMPP is best, but I guess few people use Discord for that. Matrix is in general slow and clunky, no real point of using that except if you are forced to because some very specific FOSS projects insist on using it.

P.S.: I mostly use IRC through a XMPP gateway.

Was interested who is lobbying who in this case: https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/datacard/european-transport-safety-council?rid=78891371297-34

Seems like this is mainly the EU lobbying itself 🤦

At some point the benefit of extra RAM isn’t there anymore compared to what the CPU can actually run. With a CPU like that 8GB is probably sufficient and 16 would be merely nice to have for some additional caching.