I’ve been using Signal for many years now, and it fulfils most of my messaging needs. But last year’s AWS outage, which took it offline for almost a day, showed one of its many flaws: Signal is highly centralised and reliant on big tech infrastructure.

I was therefore wondering if I shouldn’t start self-hosting my own messaging infrastructure - maybe not for my day-to-day needs, but as an emergency fallback for my closest friends and family, should Signal fail again or become unavailable or compromised (looking at you, EU Chat Control!).

My first thought was to self-host my own Matrix/Synapse server, which ticks a lot of boxes for me: end-to-end encryption, media sharing (pics, audio, videos, all that good stuff), high availability of mobile clients with modern UIs, potentially even audio/video calls. The latter is still giving me a headache since apparently, I need a TURN server to get this working properly, and I’m somewhat reluctant to open so many ports just for it to work…

What’s your perspective on self-hosting messengers: which ones do you prefer? What is your primary motivation to do it? And how have you set it up?

  • drkt@scribe.disroot.orgEnglish
    7·
    6 hours ago

    If you’re going with Matrix, consider looking at Synapse alternatives. Synapse is by a huge margin the heaviest of the backends to run and it doesn’t really get you anything extra.

    • benno@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      7·
      5 hours ago

      introducing:

      • dendrite: basically dead
      • conduit: slow development, still beta
        • conduwuit: dead fork of conduit
          • tuwunel: active fork of conduwuit
          • continuwuity: another active fork of conduwuit
        • aksdb@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          4 hours ago

          Snikket is more like a distribution than a fork. It’s basically prosody with plugins and and configs.

            • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
              1·
              3 hours ago

              You can install the stack in an LXC container and take snapshots instead. Incus makes managing that very easy.

              App stack in a system container + snapshots is a different approach from stack of app containers that you provision/tear-down but it gets you most of the same advantages.

              Bit of time needed to re-learn Docker concepts in another form but I think it’s a good tool to have on your belt. Sometimes apps aren’t available for Docker, or they ship very poorly made images, or you simply feel that a system container that you upgrade in-place is the better fit.

              Oh and Incus can also do VMs (KVM) with the exact same command interface as for LXC so you get that option too at the cost of learning one tool.