Source
r/linux•
yentity

Group chat client with offline message support on Linux

Hi Everyone,

We are a small group of people and currently use Skype to communicate with each other. This has been a pain point for most of us and are looking for good alternatives.

I really want to do Private IRC Channels but I am not sure if it supports offline messages (i.e. look at the message log in the channel while you have been offline).

I'd preferably want a solution that requires its own client software. Has anyone had any experience setting up a similar environment via Jabber or XMPP or something else?

Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

P.S. Video calls and Audio calls are preferred but not necessary.

Posted Apr 7, 2014, 8:19 PM UTC

48
FetchKFF•

IRC's really not the way to go. You can certainly log activity, but there's no clean/easy/in-client way for your users to see it when they log in.

I've got experience setting up XMPP, and it works well in a team environment. I don't have personal experience with audio calls, but Jingle is a XMPP protocol extension designed to handle that.

Prosody is a lightweight XMPP server coded in Lua that apparently has Jingle support. http://prosody.im/doc/jingle other servers might, as well. You'd want a client like Pidgin that handles the Jingle extension.

6
yentityOP•

Are you able to send offline messages via the chat room in XMPP ? i.e. when a user logs in and connects to the chat room, can he get the messages since he last logged in ?

2
FetchKFF•

Yes, by default most clients/servers seem to give the user the channel history when they log in. It's configurable server-side, generally.

3
[deleted]•

[deleted]

3
jokoone•

for exactly this purpose i have ejabberd running on my raspberrypi, works very well. a good xmpp client for that is jitsi, supports encryption and audio/video calls (even group video chats apparently, but i never used it).

3
tcyk•

You can do offline messages IRC and a suitable server or bot, you could probably do everything with XMPP, but it's a lot simpler to just use the right tool for the right job. The right tool for offline messages is email. If you really do need one overcomplicated client and protocol to do everything, then - seriously, why? - Jitsi is the main FOSS Skypealike.

2
trish1975•

From what I can gather, Retroshare currently offers this functionality in a decentralised fashion, however not many people use it and there currently isn't a real functional mobile port.

Expect that to change in time, hopefully.

2
DevPump•

Try taking a look at some of the tox clients (Its still in development but the features you want are at least planned.) http://tox.im/ Only one of the clients currently supports proper group messaging and voice (Toxic to my understanding) Download: http://wiki.tox.im/binaries

General pros and cons Pros: -Decentralized like Retroshare -File sharing -Multiple clients to chose from. Cons: (Featuers planned, but not developed): -Offline messages (Planned: http://wiki.tox.im/TODO#Less_important)

  • No video in current clients
  • Audio only in Toxic

Tox's Todo: http://wiki.tox.im/TODO

2
griff5w•

I briefly play with Jive's Openfire server and Spark client. Seems like it might do what you are looking to do. It can run on linux, windows and mac. Supports jitsi multi-user video bridging. If I remember correctly, it wasn't too complicated to get up and running. I ultimately bailed on it because the users never really got into it.

1