A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
Hey, all.
Is it possible to skip this 'register your server' step when creating a self-hosted Rocketchat instance? I just don't want to, ya know? Regular websearching is just giving a lot about how to disable user registration rather than skipping the server registration with Rocketchat HQ.
what about an actually free alternative, like matrix + element?
I've set up a test server for matrix as well, wanted to compare to rocket since I see it mentioned a lot.
When I told a friend (the one I'd need on board to get the group of friends to use it) he said "does it have the gifs?" Matrix has a years-long enhancement request for native giphy support which is yet resolved. I dabbled with a giphy plugin with matrix and it worked alright, but I dunno if it was good enough to win my friends over.
I see. I'm an old fart and couldn't care less about gifs. But I do care about stuff being open instead of someone suddenly telling me the conditions have changed.
Element does the same without even asking.
I started toying with mattermost as well and then saw in the logs things going to "matteranalytics" or something like that... Shouldn't be too surprised, but seemed ironic since I looked it up to avoid the similar thing with rocket
These all have Venture Capital funding, so they need analytics to convince new buyers in the next funding round. Which is why is remains complex to opt out in Element/Matrix despite long being a user complaint.
This is BTW also why the user numbers of Matrix are so artificially inflated, it is basically an investor scam.
Only IRC and XMPP do not do this, as there is no financial incentive for it.
I haven't tried any of the following, just my 0.02.
The official documentation page about registration states:
When deploying a self managed Rocket.chat >=6.x workspace you are automatically required to register your workspace upon completing the Setup Wizard
According to the same page, for versions below 6.x you have to manually register your instance.
Official documentation page about Air-gapped installs registration
Hope any of this helps. I'm quire surprised (and not in a good way) to see this mandatory requirement from Rocket.chat. Even if kt means functionality loss (access to their push notif framework for example) you should be able to decline it.
I don't have an answer for you, just a warning: This is par for the course when it comes to Rocketchat, every major version seems to come with another piece of nagware, another limit, another thing paywalled. I run a server for the non-profit I work for and they haven't even replied to my mails about maybe offering a more affordable licensing tier before Enterprise.
We don't need a lot, just push notifications (which they have to pay for, so absolutely fair to limit) and LDAP integration that isn't intentionally gimped. A supporter tier with no real extra features (we don't need their customer-facing-type features) and very limited tech support would be really nice, but I guess they don't want our poor people money. Gotta try just really hard to squeeze something from that stone instead.
Example: First they removed automatic LDAP syncing, then they blocked people from still doing it with cron. You now have to enter your admin password every time to sync "for security reasons" unless you pay at least $10 per user and month or something ridiculous (for a non-profit) like that. Not that you'd know from their website, they've removed all pricing information from there.
They've also limited the amount of (free, third-party) add-ons you can install while also adding a new feature that lets users see and request add-ons from admins. So many dark patterns.
Rocketchat narrowly won out over Matrix when Covid started but it sure as hell wouldn't now.
Yes, it's possible but this is not documented anywhere official from what I could tell
I found the following in a github issue comment chain: Assuming you have a container based deployment (which if you don't have, you should probably get), you can set the environment variable OVERWRITE_SETTING_Show_Setup_Wizard=completed to skip the registration. As far as I can tell this still works with the current rocketchat versions. A small additional complexity is that you then can't create your first admin user. This can be fixed by also setting other environment variables which create an administrator if no other admins are found on start:
OVERWRITE_SETTING_Show_Setup_Wizard=completed
ADMIN_USERNAME=example
ADMIN_PASS=example
ADMIN_EMAIL=example@localhost
INITAL_USER=yes
The alternative is to register a user and then do some raw database manipulation as documented here and promote the new user; for this you need the mongosh shell in the mongodb container (i. e. something like docker exec -it mongodb mongosh):
use rocketchat // switch to rocketchat db
db.getCollection('users').find() // list users
db.users.update({username: "test"}, { $push: { roles: "admin"}}) // make user admin
db.users.update({username: "test"}, { $pull: { roles: "admin"}}) // remove admin role from user
As another user mentioned, the alternative is to deploy older versions and then upgrade. Old container images are available under registry.rocket.chat/rocketchat/rocket.chat:$ver. Versions as recent as 4.4.0 still allow setup without cloud registration. You just need to be a bit careful in the upgrade, as you need to do several smaller steps to reach the current version, so from 4.4.0 to the most recent 6.x would for example be:
4.4.0 -> latest 4.x -> 5.0 -> latest 5.x -> 6.0 -> latest version
(make backups of your db though with mongodump)
In my opinion, rocketchat has an easier deployment compared to matrix (only two containers, three if counting the reverse proxy), but the recent pushiness of the company with their paid services (the seemingly disabled registration, giant advertisements in the settings and most recently the forced depreciation of older instances for their official apps among other things) really makes me question whether that somewhat decreased complexity makes it worth investing time and effort into such a product.
I ran mine without registration. Can't remember if that changed the functionality at all.