I want to selfhost a messaging service for my family. It should be secure and have voice calling option, ideally. Thank you.

  • Scott@lem.free.as
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    1 year ago

    Matrix. With its bridges you can “wire-in” networks like WhatsApp, Slack, Signal, Telegram, Discord, iMessage, SMS, e-mail, … and have a single app that interacts with them all. You can have a single group chat with users from all those networks participating and no one would be any the wiser.

    • z3bra@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      From my experience (with Dendrite, not synapse, so keep that in mind), bridges create “fake” users to replicate your contacts on these platform as matrix users, and they are visible on the whole instance by all their users (but you might not be able to talk to them). Also, in puppeted mode (which is what you want to “replace” your app with matrix), only a single user can use the bridge at a time, so the other users cannot use it.

      • Scott@lem.free.as
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        1 year ago

        This is true but if you’re self-hosting it’s not that much bother to add additional copies of a bridge for other users (granted, it’s not ideal).

        • z3bra@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          Bridges were not that easy to manage in my case (regarding process management, and ease of config deployment/reproductibility). It was on OpenBSD though, so your mileage may vary. And still, it leaks all of your contact informations to the other users of the server (like their phone number eventually), so definitely not suited for public instances.

            • z3bra@lemmy.sdf.org
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              1 year ago

              That’s from my own experience. I had a self-hosted matrix server running with Dendrite, and the mautrix-whatsapp bridge running. The bridge was running in puppeted mode, so upon synchronizing contacts, the bridge created “fake” users on the matrix server, one for each of my whatsapp contacts. The matrix username of these contacts is (by default) whatsapp_<phone_number>:domain.tld. And these users are visible (at least) by other users on the same server. It was my own instance and I was the sole user so I didn’t really care. But when a friend of mine wanted to try matrix, I created an account for him on the server, and when he joined, he could see all the fake whatsapp/telegram/discord users created by the bridge on the server. And as the default username includes the phone number, he basically had access to my whole phone contact list in real time.

  • Elkan Nixed@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    I’m on Signal (obviously not self hosted) and even if I really wanted to move to another platform be it self hosted or yet another privacy focussed one, I can’t ask my friends and family to move to another platform again. I already asked them to move away from WhatsApp, can’t do it again…

    • Overzeetop@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I feel you. My problems with Signal forced me back to iMessage (actually forced me off of android and back to iOS).

      I’d never considered Self-hosted messaging. It might be fun to play around with, but I can’t handle the stress of ensuring six 9s uptime for family comms.

    • ancoraunamoka@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      This is what I told most of my friend when they asked me to move to signal. Is is going to be a very shitty company managed by a shitty egocentric person and you are going to regret. But you will make people move and they won’t do it again and won’t understand the reasons

  • Dusty@l.dustybeer.com
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    1 year ago

    I host my own matrix instance for my wife, a few friends and I. It has worked great for us. They can either use a web app, or an app on their phone.

  • johntash@eviltoast.org
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    1 year ago

    If you’re already using Nextcloud, it has a chat w/ video chat as well.

    Matrix / Synapse / Element.io is also pretty cool. The UX might not be on par with what some family expects though. I don’t know if voice/video chat is built-in yet or not, but it was at least an option before.

  • philpo@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Also a vote for Matrix and Synapse. Works great and you can decide if you federate or not.

  • 8565@lemmy.quad442.com
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    1 year ago

    We use Rocketchat and love it. Been thinking about moving to Matrix but, at this point I’ve got my whole family hooked on Rocket

  • Milouse@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    Just for a family and friends I’d go for xmpp. Matrix is still an enormous greavy piece of software, hard to self host if you don’t want to pay for a gigantic server just for it. Also the UI is more like gamer/company chat (discord, slack…), what may not be what your family expect, coming from whatsapp, telegram, or plain sms. In the contrary xmpp is very light and nowadays a lot of tutorial exists on how to configure it, even with voice/video. Plus mobile apps like conversation match the habbits of other messengers.

  • hitagi@ani.social
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    1 year ago

    I like Matrix (I mostly use it with my sister) though XMPP might be a good option too if it’s just for family.

  • TrinityTek@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Another Nextcloud user here. If you setup a Nextcloud server you will see many benefits, with the Talk app being just one of them. Install OnlyOffice and you can even collaboratively edit documents in the web browser similar to Google Docs or o365. I really can’t recommend Nextcloud enough. Anyone who is into self hosting should at least give it a try.

    • phrogpilot73@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The only downside to the OnlyOffice document server is that if you can’t edit documents through the Nextcloud app (or mobile browser) on your phone with the community edition. However, you can set up your Nextcloud instance in the OnlyOffice documents app on your phone, and edit that way.

      • TrinityTek@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That’s a great tip! I had no idea that you could do that with the OnlyOffice app now. I tried a few years ago and you could only connect to their hosted services. This is a game changer! I had been doing all my editing on the desktop.

        • phrogpilot73@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yup. In the clouds section of the app, you have options for OnlyOffice cloud, OwnCloud, Nextcloud, kdrive, some crappy well known proprietary ones, and any WebDAV storage. Once I figured that out, I was pretty happy.

          • TrinityTek@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yes! I tried it as soon as I saw your comment. It works great! Back when I last tried it there was only one option to enter the address of one of their hosted servers. This is great news. Thanks for the tip!

    • jws_shadotak@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ve tried setting it up three times now but I keep getting permission errors before I can even get into it. Is there a good guide to it somewhere?

        • jws_shadotak@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yes, and I plan on doing that. I’m currently using my old gaming computer as a catch-all server. I plan on upgrading the CPU to something like a 12400 or whatever is reasonably priced at the time. I’m on an overclocked i5-4690k with 16 GB RAM, so it struggles a little bit sometimes, especially with transcoding in 4k with Plex.

          I want to eventually move to a completely headless setup with everything hosted via docker.

  • t3chskel@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    We use Matrix (Synapse) and it works extremely well. I just wish I could get a STUN/TURN server working…

    • ticho@social.fossware.space
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      1 year ago

      My family has been using Synapse since before Covid hit, including TURN server (coturn) for audio and video calls. No complaints about the UI so far, except for Element on iPhone reportedly “freezing” for a few moments when sending messages - and that was over a year ago.

      What problems do you have getting TURN to work?

      • t3chskel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I tried setting up coturn with docker but I can’t remember offhand what I had issues with. I am running a reverse proxy (Traefik) with wildcard certs. I should dig into it again. Do you happen to have any pointers or any good guides I could try following?

  • Mia@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Mattermost is really nice. They added voice calling as a beta feature a while ago and it works pretty good so far.

  • DAC Protogen@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Nextcloud looks really great and it has a chat / video chat too, I want to give it a spin in the future, as it also allows you to self-host a lot of things that people usually outsource to Microsoft, Google or Apple.

    • styx@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The video calls in nextcloud are a bit…hard to make work flawless, lol. You also need some amount of ram and cpu in the server.

      • DAC Protogen@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I think you always need some amount of ram and cpu in a server… ;D Well, it’s a shame if those video calls aren’t working nicely without some fiddling. I’ll still set up a Nextcloud at some point, for all that other stuff like calendar, contacts, office, chat and file sync. Kinda enjoying the benefits of cloud synced data, but without a corporation hosting my information and selling me to the advertisement hyenas.

          • TrinityTek@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I use Nextcloud Talk video calls outside my local LAN and I didn’t do anything special other than install the Talk app.

            • styx@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Nice. Either you are lucky or I’m unlucky :). I have used it with my previous vps which only had 2 GB ram (%94 always full with services and stuff) and 1 core. The experience was not very…convincing. I have yet to test it with my new server though.

              • TrinityTek@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                My ODroid H3+ running my Nextcloud instance is pretty over-specced, with 32 GB RAM and a 2 TB m.2 SSD, so that might explain the differing results. I’m surprised it runs so poorly on less capable hardware though. I actually have another Nextcloud instance running on a minimally specced VPS. I’ll test Talk on that instance this evening and see if my results are similar to yours.

                • styx@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  That will be a good test. It will be greatly appreciated if you post your results here or on a separate thread.