Hello, I am part of a discriminated minority group and I have been thinking of creating an open source, private ecosystem for communicating within the community. In the past, there have been projects like this hosted on Discord, Matrix, etc. and most of these failed due to being too public or too janky. Most people in our community did not feel safe using them. We need good moderation tools, possibly a way to sign up via referral codes to prevent harassment, and a way to effectively manage a lot (1000+) of people in our local area. I have been considering NextCloud’s chat service or maybe Mattermost, but I wonder what the community here thinks.
We may host some sort of private social media adjacent thing to pair along with the chat service, but I don’t know yet what a good option for that would be.
I haven’t seen many suggestions for a VPS, but I am considering going with 1984 hosting or Njalla for hosting.
What did you use for your Matrix client? I would love to learn about your experiences using it.
As for Mattermost, I haven’t heard much about it but from my first impression, it seems reliable and user-friendly for the average layperson. It’s giving more of a slack alternative which is nice!
We used Cinny, Element, and ElementX. We ended up having a lot of issues with decrypt errors and the nontechnical users would just give up and stop being part of the community, causing it to hemorrhage users.
Of course, we could always have an unencrypted main chat, but that sort of defeats the whole purpose…
I really liked that it didn’t need emails to sign up though.
At the moment, there aren’t any super secure platforms which are super user friendly and also have robust moderation tools, you’ll have to compromise somewhere. I do have a few suggestions to investigate off the top of my head, but I have limited experience with these platforms and can’t speak to the availability of moderation tools, so it will require some testing on your end.
Rocket.Chat: I haven’t used it much but it appears user-friendly and it seems to support opt-in E2EE. This might be your best bet if you’re willing to self-host.
Keybase: Likely the most secure option, it should use E2EE by default. It’s somewhat user-friendly and doesn’t require or support self-hosting, but may not be as usable as the other options?
Mattermost: Possibly the most mature platform of the bunch but doesn’t support E2EE yet.
Revolt: Early in development but it’s very similar to Discord and supports but doesn’t require self-hosting. Doesn’t support E2EE yet.
Telegram: Not E2EE but it should be very easy to use and doesn’t require or support self-hosting.
Another suggestion I have is to create an invite-only group chat on a more secure platform for long time well-known users who’ve proven to not be problematic. That way you don’t have to entirely settle for no/weak encryption.
I didn’t even know keybase had a chat function, interesting. It looks very good, however, its running very slow even on my machine for the large public channels which is unfortunate.
Unfortunately I don’t think they support self-hosting. I only mentioned Keybase and Telegram because I think they sort of met all your other criteria to varying degrees. All the other options I listed should be self-hostable if that’s important, but having E2EE (like in Keybase) will likely be more secure than self-hosting an unencrypted solution.
If Keybase doesn’t work for you, Rocket.Chat would be my next recommendation if you want to prioritize security. It supports E2EE (not sure how strong it is or if it’s audited) but it is disabled by default and enabling it may impact some functionality.