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
    3·
    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
      0·
      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
        0·
        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
          0·
          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
              1·
              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.

  • gfle@szmer.info
    0·
    1 year ago

    Matrix works, but it’s way harder and more expensive to selfhost than for example XMPP, which can be hosted even on cheapest VPS or first RPi. I would definitely take the cost and “how hard is it to maintain in the long run” into consideration.

    Mattermost also works and is pretty easy to selfhost, but it doesn’t have federation.

    Another option is always an email with delta.chat - I don’t think it offers voice calling, but email is one of the most basic services one can host, and many automated solutions to help with that exist.

    • rglullis@communick.news
      01·
      1 year ago

      The problem of XMPP is not hosting it, it’s the clients. Give me one easy-to-use guide to have

      • e2ee text messaging
      • groups
      • audio/video calling

      working equally well on desktop, Android and iOS, and I will gladly drop my matrix server.

  • johntash@eviltoast.orgEnglish
    0·
    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.