this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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I'm looking for something that can do chat, video calling with support for guess links and chats. I need it to work in the browser so I can send people a link to a chat session. Bonus if it has a simple mobile app and calendar integration.

Anyone know of something that isn't Nextcloud Chat?

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[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 40 points 1 week ago (15 children)

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.

[–] Smoolak@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I'm hosting a matrix server with a TURN server and it's fairly easy to selfhost. This sounds exaggerated.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That just covers voice/video. OP is asking about a lot more.

[–] Colloidal@programming.dev 10 points 1 week ago

And chat. But yeah, no groupware.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

Video+chat is all I'm wanting for the most part

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Do you need Element for that? Also is there a way to do guest access with a link?

[–] tekato@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

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.

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You want either mattermost or the whole matrix stack (backend, plus element with voice/video calls).

Matrix/Element is more of a discord alternative, whereas mattermost tries to be more of a slack alternative, where it seems to have some calendar integrations.

[–] rdschouw@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I haven’t tried it myself but Mattermost offers most of what you’re looking for.

https://github.com/mattermost

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

I think a gitlab install has most of mattermost inside it, and that means installation and updates are handled. I found the install of MatterMost via its devs used to be very naive, but the gitlab people did something right in vendoring it into their massive install. Gitlab-ce is bloated as heck, but it's fire-and-forget on the proper platform and may allow inter-org linking with or without the matter bridge thing (which itself affords some interoperability).

[–] rimu@piefed.social 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Check out Big Blue Button - https://demo.bigbluebutton.org/

Their website talks all about using it for teaching students but it's really just like Jitsi with more features.

Big bluebutton is now integrated into Canvas, an open source learning management software (LMS) that every school I have went to has used.

[–] OmegaLemmy@discuss.online 14 points 1 week ago (4 children)
[–] OmegaLemmy@discuss.online 6 points 1 week ago

Self hosting allows you to improve screen share framerate

[–] makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago

We use this at work. Great for screen sharing and video chat

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[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago

Matrix with the Jitsi meet plugin.

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 11 points 1 week ago

I think Mattermost is intended to be just that.

[–] ryokimball@infosec.pub 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I have not tried Matrix yet but I hear it's a good replacement, fashioned more to the likes of Discord but I think it has everything you're looking for

[–] nimmo@social.nimmog.uk 2 points 1 week ago

I've been using matrix for quite a while now and I'm very happy with it.

The thing to be aware of though is that it takes quite a bit of work to get started, but once you've got it up and running it doesn't need much coddling. It's got video calling built into it now and can be entirely web based if you want it to be. I have all of my signal, WhatsApp and SMS messages being brodged over through it which is handy. I've also got a discord bridge set up which will bring all DMs and let's me bridge any of the servers I want to bring over.

it's been my one app for communicating with anyone that wants to talk to me on any IM platform I use, as well as any of the federated rooms and spaces I want to access from other home servers I want to work with.

Edit: I also recently added authentication via oidc which was great as now I don't need to worry about passwords as I just authenticate with passkeys on most of my self hosted services.

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[–] airikr@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 week ago

I've been using self-hosted Jitsi Meet for a few weeks now. Works perfectly. Haven't tried the calendar feature, though.

[–] inso@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] nucleative@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Huly is pretty amazing and has a self host option. It supports chats and video calls, team rooms, and has some cool integration for speech to text note taking. It also functions as a task tracker.

Under super active development right now so host only if you can deal with occasional breaking changes.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Idk, I've heard things about HooliChat... Didn't their stream go down in the middle of a big title fight?

[–] adhocfungus@midwest.social 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Plus that Gavin Belson guy keeps trying to jam his horrible signature into his products.

That guy is the woooorst

[–] dash_jackson@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What's their revenue model? Thanks for sharing

[–] nucleative@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

They have a SaaS option as well, I'm guessing that's the main revenue plan.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

Considering

  • nearly a curl|sh setup
  • to run supply-chain risks
  • of supply-chain risks
  • for something without an immutable artefact and thus is its own supply-chain risk

It's already breaking ISO27002 in a few ways. I'm out.

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[–] HelloRoot@lemy.lol 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Jitsi

,but it is a pain in the ass to selfhost with good performance.

You can take a look here as well:

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#communication---video-conferencing

One alternative that is not on the awesome selfhosted list is: https://edumeet.org/

But it is even more of a PAIN to selfhost it.

[–] Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 6 points 1 week ago

Anyone know of something that isn't Nextcloud Chat?

Do you absolutely need to put ONE tag on it all and say this is it?

I already made a comment but you should also look at rocketchat and revolt, since they are basically FOSS discord clones

(I saw comments in the thread about wanting audio only calls.)

[–] nixxo@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (9 children)

I use jami but i dont think it fits your need for guess links.

Still leave it here just in case

https://jami.net/

Jami is a free/libre, end-to-end encrypted, and private communication software.

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[–] sonalder@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago

If you don't mind seperated tools that do well in their own :

  • Zulip for chat
  • Jitsi for video meeting
  • And whatever calendar you want for the calendar
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