

Every one always says XMPP and there were a lot of recommendations for ejabberd. I tried this recently and it was a total disaster, I do not have a working chat server. If I followed the docker instructions the server would just crash with no details of what went wrong. Where it should have been creating a default server config file it was instead creating a directory with the wrong permissions then promptly crashing. I tried following their documentation but after about 6 hours of messing about and adding more and more I still couldn’t get a client to login to it. I have no idea how to make this work.
So whatever the solution ultimately is I can’t recommend Ejabberd.

On the one hand they were talking selfhosting and then they pull out multiple $10s thousands rack servers. People don’t need a data centre at home to sync some files, pictures, email and play some media!