Hello,

I’ve been self hosting Nextcloud for the last half a year, and my family has been using Nextcloud Talk to communicate. However, as cool it is overall, we suffer from a lot of missed messages. I’ve been keeping an eye on (and contributing to) the Android app, but even with all the updates, it seems like they can’t quite figure out the issue with notifications not appearing consistently. My wife is fed up, so I’m looking for alternatives.

It seems like Matrix is the next logical one to try, but the Android apps have pretty poor reviews. A lot of the self hosted messengers also seem to be more like Slack replacements, rather than focused on family & friend use.

Has anyone had a good experience with a self hosted messenger for family use?

Thanks!

  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    16 hours ago

    I’ve been doing research on this and came down to two.

    1. simplex
    2. delta chat

    simplex won because of the robust encryption and selfhosted option.

    a close contender was stoneage. I liked all it took was an S3 bucket. I didn’t like that it hasn’t been updated in 3 years.

    • unitedwithme@lemmy.todayEnglish
      4·
      14 hours ago

      SimpleX is going away I thought. Any reason you don’t want to use Signal, or setup XMPP/Jabber/Snikket/Prosody, etc.

      • GreenKnight23@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        12 hours ago

        signal has privacy problems.

        xmpp/jabber/snikket have encryption and security problems.

        from what I can see simplex has everything I need.

        • selfhosted
        • e2e encryption
        • forward security
        • routinely maintained
        • does not require user IDs

        My hesitation to using simplex is the selfhosting aspect of it. I’ve been researching the simplex protocol (SMP) and have been thinking out ways to develop a serverless version of it, that way you don’t get charged for something that’s not being used if you host it in the cloud.

        anyway, just my 2¢.

        • unitedwithme@lemmy.todayEnglish
          3·
          11 hours ago

          Try Simplex on Yunohost. I mean, it’s about as clean/quick as can be iirc. Simplex has the lead in security, but I recall the app stating they couldn’t keep servers funded and are shutting down. So you might need to run your own to be on the safe side.

          Signal had privacy problems?? Maybe using Google play notifications? I download the apk to be Google free, works on my lineage OS just fine without micro g.

          XMPP, if you’re all within the same ecosystem vs SMS or RCS chat (which only carriers services support), it’ll use OMEMO encryption and is e2e encryption. I host my own instance to have a little extra control. And that’s on top of everything else secure about it. Anyway, I believe you can enable traffic over Tor for XMPP, but I do not have that bc it breaks voice calls.

          • GreenKnight23@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            1 hour ago

            Signal had privacy problems?? Maybe using Google play notifications?

            I’m not a fan of having my personal identity tied to it. last I checked signal still requires a phone number.

            looks like I might have been wrong originally, but it looks like signal actually does fwd secrecy as well as post-quantum encryption.

            keep in mind I’m replacing telegram. I have put off moving for some years but I have the itch to replace it now. simplex also has the closest feature-pairity to telegram out of all the messengers on that list.

            also I’m building and hosting this for very nontechnical users. if they heard tor they’d think it was the “darknet”.

            my goal is

            • keep it secure
            • keep it private
            • keep it simple