There seem to be plentiful options for text chat servers, so I’m curious for those that self-host their own, what their preferences & experiences have been with them.
Also those mentioned in the title were just a few examples, if you run something else, e.g. Revolt or Mattermost or something else less popular, would be interested in reading about it!
Matrix (synapse) + element-web works for me, although I didn’t get many people on board.
Mumble is what I use the most, with 2-10 users - it’s primarily for VoIP/gaming comms, but also has basic text chat. Text messages are not persistent though, and there is no web interface, only desktop/mobile clients.
For pragmatism, I just use Signal (not self-hosted) because it is at least partly FOSS, looks reasonably secure/private, and the UX is good enough so I could get people to use it.
I recommend checking out dendrite instead of synapse since it is more lightweight.
I have tried a few other matrix servers (dendrite and conduit), something always ended up not working because they don’t implement everything synapse (the reference server) does, or there were bugs - generally audio/video calling or file transfer would break. Synapse worked out of the box. It also has good documentation.
I don’t see any performance problems or abnormal resource usage with synapse either. As I said I don’t use it that much, so maybe there is something nasty I didn’t see yet. From what I’ve read, it is only a problem when you federate with “large” instances/rooms, but my server is not federated, it’s just a basic private chat server.