https://snikket.org/ specifically for a small family server. Much lower maintenance and breakages than Matrix and thus less issues with the family.

+1 for xmpp

Yes, sadly I think you're right. I played around with it a bit today...showed great promise...then uninstalled it and tried to do a fresh install and since then, nada.

Can you do an equivalent of matrix bridges on xmpp?

Probably less reliable for me as a techie. Every time I opened Jami, my firewall alerts would go off about a device on the network calling to China, Russia, and Vietnam lol. Resulted in it almost never connecting for me since my network just blocked way to many connections on it for outbound traffic.

Why does nobody like matrix? I get setup maybe used to be hard but I personally used ansible playbook and its really noob friendly and simple

It sounds good but in practice it doesn't work out; laptops sleep, people put their phones on airplane at night, whatever happens in life. The "best" solutions use some sort of cache-and-forward relay (thinking like DeltaChat relays, or I hear SimpleX is adding them) but I think most end up looking at Snikket (xmpp) or Matrix for the group management etc. on a central server. The Disroot group uses "Movim" which is XMPP highly customized to a social experience.

I use DeltaChat with friends and there's a lot of things you can't do because it's essentially P2P with caching relays - like Jami, all control and data is stored on the device(s). If all you're looking for is a Signal replacement it's great (and why we use it), but if you want good group social controls you gotta go the central server route.

I think Jami here could do with caching relays like Delta has, could move this project to the next level.

I like matrix too but am dealing with weird networking issues, across ancient devices. Issues around MatrixRTC, old android devices, using HTTP vs HTTPS and the like are making me not want to live on this world any more.

Postscript: it went terribly. That is...it worked perfectly on test devices / with test accounts. Then I thought "ok...this has potential! Then it shat the bed, in a way I couldn't grok (and frankly, I didn't have the energy to trouble shoot).

Then I thought "fine...clearly Jami is flaky. LiveKit and MatrixRTC are shitty with Synapse...I know X wants to video call Y....let me try a clean cut over to Continuwuity + Tailscale".

...and now I hate everything and everyone.

So, that probably means I will try Jami again one more time and then just switch to Snikket.

The moral of the story is: I should have played with dollies as a kid instead of computers, because this exact pattern of fuckery has been the bane of my existence near on half a century now.

Le-fucking-sigh.

Fuck it; I'm going get Claude to set this up. "Claude, take the fucking wheel and make no mistakes."

I've been hammering it hard rn and it definitely is the Unified Push / DHT proxy. The instant those are disabled, it works reliably. So I may need to revise my position.

The thing that really caught my attention is the jami daemon

https://docs.jami.net/en_US/user/jami-for-servers.html

If I'm reading that right, it's sort of like a headless instance that can store and forward. Additionally, it doesn't require tail-scale / head-scale to do so (as jami has its own protocol). So no nonsense with domains, reverse proxy, certificate infrastructure or public chat service.

The only issue is "it's not self hosted", which was part of the brief.

XMPP is not good. The clients are poor. The core server requires a bunch of extensions to do basic stuff like sync history with clients. I have my gripes with Matrix but I ran right back to it after trying xmpp for a month. Yes I tried the distros etc etc, the stack is too old and people aren't modernizing it.

I don't understand why people keep bringing it up as if it is a viable modern replacement for Matrix, it isn't.

It wasn't interoperable enough with the wide cornucopia of devices in the group. We're talking Mac, pc, android 6 thru to 15 and a few more besides.

It wasn't that XMPP was incapable, it's that the client matrix was too uneven across the wide range of devices I needed to support.

IRC was simpler, lighter, easier to diagnose, and had clients for basically everything. Plus most of us were familiar with IRC from back in the day.

I also already had Janus for video chat set up, plus Tailscale already hooked into the pi, so most of XMPP's extra machinery solved problems I no longer had.

TL; DR easier to host on pi, easier for client devices, less moving parts.

Personally, I just really like the look and feel of motd

EDIT: Just to be clear...if IRC ever goes tits up or gives me shit, XMPP will be the thing we switch to - in a heart beat.

Sir, this is !self hosted.