alt Hacker NewsI recently switched a bunch of friends from a project-oriented whatsapp chat to self-hosted mattermost, because I wanted permanent storage for messages and attachments, and threads, and did not want to pay slack in perpetuity.
I feel that this idea is now in jeopardy, if I understand the 10k message history is the limit correctly.
And there I thought I had a solution to slowly bring over project channels, family related things etc. that was as reliable as "my linux box will be reachable on the public internet" and I am willing to manage that it does.
Seems I was wrong, but I don't know which other software has better future proofing.
So I guess it's my turn today to start the holy war. If Whatsapp was enough, but you want it to live on your Linux box, Matrix will do just fine. self-hosting has been fast, responsive, low-maintenance, and easy for me over the past several years.
They're trusted by multiple government agencies to stick around and treat their users reasonably, and there are a plethora of clients to choose from.
Now I'll step to the side for the next person to tear me down and sell you on XMPP.