this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
51 points (89.2% liked)

Selfhosted

40219 readers
997 users here now

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:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. 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.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
51
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

After the arrest of Pavel Durov, I wanted to move from Telegram to something end-to-end encrypted. I know Signal is pretty good, but I think it is better to have our messages in my own server.

I have already looked in XMPP, but it required SSL certs and I did not have the mood to configure them.

Do you know any other selfhosted messaging service for a group of 4-5 friends, or an easy way to configure an XMPP server? Or shall I use Signal after all (I don't really care that much about being selfhosted, I just thought it would be more privacy friendly)?

UPDATE: I managed to set up an XMPP server using prosody with the SSL certs. We have been testing it with my friend and it seems to go well.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Most people use either Matrix or XMPP. Both work.

There is a nice overview of chat protocols here: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/

I mostly use matrix as of today. I think it's alright. It's a bit difficult to explain encryption and device verification to other people... I think that could be designed better. But apart from that it works very well. So does XMPP which I've used before that. Have a look at the messenger matrix and all the options before deciding on an ecosystem. I'd take one of the friends and do some evaluation before dragging the whole group in. You can do that with some pre-existing servers before learning how to host the server part.

And btw: With most of them you can just use some public servers. You should do that unless you're willing to put in the effort to maintain an own server. That'd give you complete control over the infrastructure... But it's also a liability to maintain a server, do the updates etc for a group of friends and maybe years to come... End to end encryption will keep the content of your messages private, anyways. (If you use it.)