this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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There is no way to do what teams does without significant infrastructure. Same with Slack and others.
If you want something that just gets close to the mark, look at Jitsi. It's about as complete as you could expect for just video/voice.
What you may not understand about conferencing platforms is that they are dozens of different hosted services working together to provide a cohesive UE. Video, SIP, VOIP, auth, identity...these are all separate services that are deployed as microservices to get what you get. If you find the bare minimum of the services you actually need, you can probably cobble something together, but it's not going to be a simple running of one service to get the same experience.
I'm hosting a matrix server with a TURN server and it's fairly easy to selfhost. This sounds exaggerated.
That just covers voice/video. OP is asking about a lot more.
And chat. But yeah, no groupware.
Video+chat is all I'm wanting for the most part
Do you need Element for that? Also is there a way to do guest access with a link?
You can allow guest accounts, although it’s disabled by default in synapse.
Call supports depends on the client you’re using. Element is usually ahead in features implementation, but you can get a list of clients and filter by features in the matrix website.
Also I’m not sure what the other person meant by easy to setup. Matrix servers are notoriously hard to setup when compared to anything most things you would find yourself selfhosting, specially with WebRTC/TURN. I think there’s an ansible playbook somewhere, but I never tried it.
If you want something to mangle the formating on his Office documents there really is no alternatives available sadly. Chat there is.
It isn't that hard. All I'm looking for is a chat/video call service. Jitsi is close but it purely does video calling. I want something that is a chat where guests can join a group with a link. That shouldn't take much. (It didn't with Nextcloud)
Well if "it shouldn't take much", then it shouldn't be hard to find a solution, right?
I'm now wondering why you're here asking this question if you fully understand what you're asking about.
It’s not hard. Just Teams but self-hosted. Free would be ideal.
/s
Right? I just want to self-host something like Google and all their services, but free. It also has to run on an AMD K6-2 with 1GB of DDR1 RAM and under 20GB for storage. Please don't ask me any questions, I know exactly what I'm doing.
Uhm actually the k6-2 took EDO or SDRAM. You won't get it running with DDR.
It's actually not that hard. (Well it is, media and networking are hard, but)
I think the problem is that when people search for something better than Teams (or any other software), they confuse "better than", with a mostly nonexistent "best". In doing so, they skip over the way every single thing people suggest is "good enough".
Like, following this thread, we went from "I want a teams (voice/video/chat) alternative" to "Yeah I don't like Jami because it leaks metadata." How did we go from wanting a teams alternative, to wanting privacy with no metadata leakage? Those are very different things, and you make tradeoffs if you take one set of feature over the other. If you just add "no metadata leakage" on top of your current wishes, then you are probably going to be disatisfied with every option given.
Or "Firewalls and hole punching!" (implying a p2p architecture) and "depends on peers being reliable" (being frustrated with the pitfalls of a p2p architecture). Again, wtf? Of course there is software that is both p2p and client server, but that is hard and tradeoffs will end up being made, even purely in what the developer spends their limited time on.
This person just needs to get out of their head, whip up deployments for every software (or suite if there is more than one) mentioned in the thread, and pick the one that looks the nicest.
Then write a howto instead of asking here. That shouldn't take much.
Honestly I might put that on my list of cool projects
It is easier than you think. There are libraries that do Firewall/NAT traversal automatically so the hard part would be making the UI
I never said how easy I think it is so what are you basing this response on?
Not sure what you mean by that. Turn off the camera and you've got an audio chat.
That's exactly how Jitsi works.
Signal is not self hosted but they also support videoconference style calls.
Jitsi is closer to Zoom than anything else
I'm looking for the chat plus the ability to start a call
I see. What about Matrix?