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Hey FOSS fam, I need your expert opinions:

I'd like to stand up a chat server for a small 1-day con that I'm organizing, but I don't want to use Slack or Discord or any of the other freemium corpo services. What can I run instead?

Must haves:
* FOSS (obv)
* can run on a relatively inexpensive VPS (e.g., Hetzner or Digital Ocean)
* reasonably performant (up to 50 concurrent users)
* web GUI for users who don't want to download an app
* chat room
* allows basic moderation functionality (eg ban)
* reasonably secure

Nice to haves:
* end to end encryption
* ease of setup / administration
* invite-only channels (in addition to public room)
* direct messaging

From my research so far, my understanding is that I can basically choose between #matrix or #xmpp. (Maybe #IRC ??)

Of the two, XMPP looks like it's more performant (I see constantly see people complain about Matrix being slow) at the expense of encryption by default. Still, I'm not sure which implementation of XMPP server would suit our needs best.

What do you think? What would you suggest?

Boosts welcome!

#foss #chat #privacy #infosec #linux #debian #ubuntu #bsides #cybersecurity #selfhost