A Chat About Chat

For the past few months, we've been getting Mount Vollo off the ground. Building the foundation, refining the ideas, and, most importantly, talking a lot. We use chat and video calls extensively, because, well, we need to communicate.

So when we started out, we defaulted to Slack. With the free version, you only get three months of chat history. Messages lost. Jokes forgotten. Important decisions suddenly undocumented.

And then there’s the privacy aspect. We like the idea of keeping our conversations out of the hands of companies whose primary business model is, well, knowing everything about you. We also want to support European initiatives whenever possible. Privacy-conscious solutions built closer to home, rather than relying on US-based giants.

So we started looking for alternatives. Preferably something European, something privacy-conscious, and, ideally, something with end-to-end encryption and zero knowledge. We don’t mind paying a fair price, but as a young company, we’d rather not overspend on something that should be fundamental.

The Search

To start with, we considered three alternatives:

• Jitsi: Free, open source, promising. But it has no chat or collaboration features, and we had some performance issues the last time we used it.
• Element.io: Based on Matrix (decentralized and federated), so a solid option. However while it does offer encrypted chats, for video calls it depends on other solutions like Jitsi. Also, no custom domains in the base tier.
• Threema: Looks great on paper: secure, privacy-friendly… But the signup process was rather cumbersome. And while it does offer video calling, you can’t do that from the desktop version.

Doing it ourselves

At this point, it became clear: if we wanted privacy, reliability, and control, we’d have to take matters into our own hands. We were already experimenting with Nextcloud for file sharing, so why not see if it could handle chat and video calls, too? Also, this aligns perfectly with our philosophy: using and testing the very tools we host ourselves.

Will it work? We’ll find out by using it. We’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, if you know of a great alternative that we missed—something privacy-friendly, European, and reasonably priced—let us know. We’re all ears.