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?

  • Spite_By_Design_LLC@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    XMPP hosted via Raspberry Pi.

    The setup is:

    • Prosody provides the XMPP server.
    • Converse.js provides web client / PWA.
    • Conversations for Android clients
    • Coturn provides TURN services for calls and NAT traversal.
    • Tailscale provides remote access without exposing the XMPP server directly to the public internet.

    (nb: also configured Message Archive Management (MAM) for chat history, private multi-user chat rooms (MUC), HTTP File Upload for media, and Jingle signalling for audio/video calls).

    The server is designed to be accessible over our LAN. When away from home, family members connect through Tailscale (I really should just use Android actions and geofencing to auto launch Tailscale, but on my kids devices, I just leave Tailscale enabled. I don’t think it hits the battery too hard). Tailscale can only connect to XMPP and we keep our XMPP to family only, with me manually adding devices to Tailscale as I need to.

    As for why? Because I get joy from hosting my own shit, having control over it, having it work when other stuff falls over. My stuff falls over too, but I know WHY and HOW to fix it, and that’s how I prefer it. I want to get to the point that if the internet dies tomorrow, I shrug my shoulder and barely notice.

    My goal is to replace all cloud based services we use and I’m about 85% of the way there. I have a much larger goal too…but that’s a story for a different time.

    PS: I’m mildly irritated about Tailscale use, so I’m looking at getting off that teat as well eventually for a self hosted solution. There are some issues with Headscale and I don’t want to punch holes in firewall if I can avoid it. Still thinking on it.

    PPS: Meshtastic, Reticulum etc all seem super cool…but until there’s interoperability simple enough for normies…good luck getting buy in. I struggle to convince the fam to use XMPP (weird issues with android clients, Tailscale drop outs etc).