this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Selfhosted

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[–] wabasso@lemmy.ca 28 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

I’m in the process of getting this going in my lab. I appreciate these efforts to find alternatives.

That being said, can I get some opinions so I can pare down the list?

Would be great to have E2EE and audio. Video bonus. I don’t think I’ve got much in the way of preferences beyond that.

My latest leaning is hosting the Matrix protocol.

Also the only friends I have that would be willing to move off the easy corporate software are tech literate, so I have the option to distribute VPN confs and the like. Has anyone hosted chat over their own VPN, or does that just become a mess because STUN/TURN needs to be “free”?

(Sorry I’m still learning a lot here)

[–] liquidambar@lemmy.world 6 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

I quite like Nextcloud with Talk (spreed), but it's a whole cloud suite. Nextcloud is E2EE, and NC Talk does text, voice, and video. The phone apps are nice too. The only problem is connecting more than 2-3 people in a voice/video call can be a bit much, so they recommend a high-performance backend (either a paid service, or annoying to set up yourself). It might be overkill if you don't also use Nextcloud's other applications, but I use a lot of them extensively, especially when feeding CalDav calendars etc into Home Assistant. Friends making an account on your nextcloud is pretty trivial, even for people who aren't technical. I use the VM hooked to dedyn io for outside access, and it was all very easy to set up. I've had it running for about 6 years now, and only had a problem updating for a while, but it was resolved by the community forums.

[–] Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 13 hours ago

TURN server doesn't need to be free, you just need everyone to be able to access it.

The product I work on in my 9to5 would be perfect for your use case from the technical side of things but sadly the commercial side is a completely different story that makes it not even worth recommending.

[–] SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

snikket is pretty slick. omemo is worrisome though

[–] Neptr@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

OMEMO is better than nothing. Much better than OTR or PGP (looking at you DeltaChat), and the biggest problem seems to be the metadata and old versions used in some clients. The encryption (of message contents) at the very least is decent.

OMEMO is better than Matrix's encryption, which the later doesnt offer proper forward secrecy and breaks all the time leaving messages inaccessible.

[–] SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

oh that makes me excited! i was worried my bugging the fam may have been a waste, or not as useful as id hoped

[–] Neptr@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

It still isnt great. Better than DeltaChat/Matrix but decently worse than Signal's security.

[–] SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

oh that takes away that excitement that was previously restored