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:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
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.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
XMPP most definitely! Especially if you want to have connectivity to other servers at all (like simplex). It's much simpler, more well-known, battle hardened, and still supports E2EE and video calling very well.
I recommend prosody. I recently went through the process of setting up a server and have a draft blog on it half way finished if you want an account of the experience.
EDIT: Blog post is live at https://roguesecurity.dev/blog/xmpp
+1 for XMPP
I'm also hoping to self-host Prosidy (when I get a spare evening / weekend), so if you could post your notes that would be good.
There are some good notes on the Arch Wiki if that helps
Arch wiki never fails to deliver!
Here's the blog post: https://roguesecurity.dev/blog/xmpp
Nice breakdown
+1 for including the word "behoove" in your blog
😆 +1 for reading enough to see that! Thank you!
I'm one of those people that ends up using the vocabulary I once learned to get the most value out of it. Would hate to waste all that. Haha.
IMO Snikket (XMPP) is the easiest all-in-one solution with audio/video chat at the moment. Pretty good on resources too.
I currently host a Matrix Synapse server, but:
I have gone down the matrix rabbit hole but i choose Continuwity, which is the successor to Conduwuit after the community drama.
It's a rust server alternative to synapse, it's lightweight and works very well.
Fuck synapse, it's a colossal pain for small servers, not worth it. I also actively avoid anything related to the company behind it since I think they poison what matrix could be.
I wish I started with XMPP, but now I am selfhosted on matrix, so.
Lol, exact same situation here.
Quick question, did the migration to continuwuity break calls for you as well?
Never used calls...
Snikket locked my docker service up, their documentation sucks for when you want to use your own reverse proxy or bind it behind a docker network and not the host.
I haven't run snikket before, but it looks straightforward to me. Maybe the documentation has improved?
Doesn’t cover Traefik, plus the docker-compose.yml contains 4 separate images and researching into them didn’t provide much info. snicket_proxy, snikket_certs, snikket_portal and snikket_server. All four of these images bind to the host but if I am supplying my own reverse proxy then both snikket_proxy and snikket_certs are redundant right? Or do they serve another purpose? And if I wanted to take them off the host network, follow their firewall guide and expose the necessary ports manually behind a docker bridge network what images do I bind those ports to? When I tried binding them all to snikket_server that’s when my docker service crashed and I gave up.
I see. Yeah, that compose file is gross unless you're running this on a dedicated vps, and even then...
Thanks! I didn't know about this and it is from the developers of prosody (currently mentioned in the top reply) so will definitely be trying it! https://blog.prosody.im/introducing-snikket/
Trying Tuwunnel, works very well
I'm self hosting matrix and its great
XMPP, but also Delta Chat! The Webxdc apps for Delta work in XMPP client Cheogram despite there being no cross-compatibility between the networks. It can access ordinary email servers so long as they were not set up maliciously (Apple, M$, Gmail, etc). It can do a couple things XMPP cannot, but it's not suitable for anyone outside close friends and family. I basically only use it for email, automation, and other personal matters. XMPP is for general use and can replace Discord. The Movim project looks very cool they have a community here also join their XMPP chat. Cheogram services can connect to the regular phone network.
Just updated my original comment, but that XMPP blog post I mentioned is live: https://roguesecurity.dev/blog/xmpp
If you like SimpleX, you can host a server and configure your clients to use that. You don't use only your server though, so I don't know if this will satisfy your requirements.
Why not "only"?
Because at least when you use their private routing feature messages go: sender -> custom sender's server -> custom receiver's server -> receiver
So unless sender and receiver are configured to use servers under your control, there will be at least one foreign server involved.
To be fair I'm not sure how that works, when you don't use their private routing feature.
Oh yeah sorry I thought that both ends configured custom self hosted servers. But yeah in the "normal" case the self hosted server is "only" contributing to the network
I mean, XMPP is great, but if you are only interested in private chats with your family in a virtual LAN then it (and Matrix) is probably overkill and a bit of a hassle to configure without a public domain (as that is expected for federation).
Maybe a Nextcloud Talk or a Jitsi Meet instance would be simpler?
Nextcloud Talk ils a great option for families. But if you expect to use the Video Call feature, prepare for a lot of headache. I tried multiple time configuring it, never managed to make it work for longer than one call.
I finally made it work last week. I was overcomplicating, as usual: nextcloud AIO includes all the requirements to run Talk, I just had to modify the config file to point at my domain and add a new entry at :8081 on my reverse proxy. Hosted a 2 hour video call with 3 friends without issues!
Well you are lucky, or they fixed their mess a way or another. I spent at least a full week to try to make it work, to no avail.
matrix using smth like tuwunel or xmpp using prosody could intrest you if you want smth more video zoom only esc you can look into jitsi
If you are into text based chat with lot channels & topics and the ability to move discussion into a topic, i would recommend zulip. I find it better than Matrix.
you can try the zulip chat of piefed : https://chat.piefed.social/
Mind it doesn't support visio chat.
Every one always says XMPP and there were a lot of recommendations for ejabberd. I tried this recently and it was a total disaster, I do not have a working chat server. If I followed the docker instructions the server would just crash with no details of what went wrong. Where it should have been creating a default server config file it was instead creating a directory with the wrong permissions then promptly crashing. I tried following their documentation but after about 6 hours of messing about and adding more and more I still couldn't get a client to login to it. I have no idea how to make this work.
So whatever the solution ultimately is I can't recommend Ejabberd.
Ejabberd is definitly for more advanced user, but you can usually get help over at joinjabber.org (which has a webclient that you can use without an xmpp account).
But yes, Snikket and Prosody is easier to set up.
@gedaliyah maybe @delta could be interesting. I found the quite intuitive and well documented. Only thing missing is out-of-the-box calls and video chat. You need a webrtc capable instance for that, I believe.
@stormii @gedaliyah stay tuned :) directly integrated calls are in development currently, next releases are to come with experimental support.