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!
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I managed to get my immediate family all on Signal, so that’s my vote!
Correct. Just use Signal. Problem solved.
Me too, all family and friends use signal if they want to chat with me.
Make sure the app is set to “unrestricted” under battery settings. Most phones get really aggressive nuking down stuff that is not from FAANG
I use Signal because it’s the best balance of privacy and security vs. convenience and reliability I have found. Not self-hosted, but I’ve yet to find a self hosted alternative that is as reliable, especially since I don’t want to set up distributed servers, and it’s one of those things that “just needs to work” or people will abandon it quickly.
And the older people I’ve convinced to use it, like my mom, have had very little trouble adopting it. It helped that RCS messaging is so unreliable on my phone since Google or my carrier keep seeming to break it (likely became I use GrapheneOS), and also for those with iPhones it is way more compatible with itself vs Apple and Google refusing to implement RCS in a way that all features work between them, like message reactions. Without RCS, my mom couldn’t send me decent quality pictures of my niece all the time, and I couldn’t send nice pictures of my outfits to the girl I’m dating, LOL.
My wife and I use Signal. It works well.
@anakin78z We use xmpp (prosody on the server; a mix of conversations/cheogram/dino/snikket on our phones and laptops). We’ve got a family chat where the kids share the latest memes, and we message back and forth. We do also have signal (or in my case, Molly) installed, but don’t use it that much. My wife just switched phones and signal was unable to transfer stuff from phone phone to the other - in general I find signal annoying to use.
We use matrix for a few years but it was buggy and dumb.
@anakin78z I still have to use Matrix for work. The clients suck (literally every single one I’ve tried, and I even briefly maintained Neochat for debian) and I routinely get key errors.
and I routinely get key errors
did you try reporting them? they are watching for reports, and they are making automated tests for all cases they receive. you should probably both open an issue in the client repo, and then use the “report a problem” button in the client and paste the github issue link. before you send the report open the chat with the decryption error, or try to reproduce it with a new message if you can, so that they can get better logs. probably also toggle on the “contact me”.
if you get a new message that can’t be decrypted, send a report from the client soon. don’t need to open a different issue if you don’t want.
That’s pretty cool that you use Matrix for work!
Thanks for the info. My wife and I tried Signal a while back and didn’t care for it.
I’m trying to get xmpp going today, even just as a test. 🤞
My wife and I tried Signal a while back and didn’t care for it.
What about it didn’t you like? I have no investment in Signal, my curiosity is just piqued since my wife and I use it.
It wasn’t one specific thing. We were switching from Facebook Messenger, and found ourselves not wanting to use it all that much, often falling back to Messenger. For me, personally, I also didn’t like that it didn’t have a web client.
Fair enough. Signal does ship desktop clients for Windows, Mac, and even Linux; I’m actually using the Linux desktop client to chat with my wife right now.
It’s something 🤷
xmpp. don’t matrix, it causes selfhosting-phobia for normies because its ui sucks. i had a friend try matrix with me for a while and now they’re never trying another foss messenger again unless its proved to be very good.
I’m not sure what the problem with the android version of Element X might be, it works perfectly for me and my wife. Voice and vid work fine, but that’s also using the matrix.org server. YMMV with your own self-hosted server, I have one for my agents but I haven’t used voice/vid with it.
And yah, I had high hopes for NC Talk, but it’s not worth the trouble even if you provision a STUN/TURN server.
Does it have to be self-hosted? I’ve had tons of problems with Matrix. Many fewer issues with XMPP.
Chatmail is probably the easiest and best bet for reliability. Deltachat is the OG but I like Arcanechat, it’s a fork with more features.
I guess it doesn’t have to be, but I really like the idea of having control over the data, and not handing it over to some other entity, even if they say they’re not evil. It just seems like communication without a 3rd party in between is a good idea, so I’m trying to make that work for now.
+1 for XMPP
I’m currently using a public server until I get my own (Raspberry Pi based) Prosody server running
Never had a missed notification / message and video calls are great too… even Grandma can use it
Using Conversations (Android) and Monal (ios)
I host snikket (which is built on top of prosody) for my family and (especially) my pre-teen children and their friends. Pretty happy with it, all things considered.
Everyone’s using a client; the snikket invitation link makes it pretty easy – I just print the kids a QR code (or text a link to their parents), and they’ve all figured it out easily enough. It’s not perfect, don’t get me wrong, but it’s the best I was able to come up with and it’s been successful.
Definitely decentralization is a good idea, but it also adds a layer of complexity that many are unable to grasp. Signal is always the easiest but I have major concerns about their longevity.
Yea, we tried Signal a while back, but for whatever reason we didn’t care for it.
I’ve been doing research on this and came down to two.
- simplex
- 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.
SimpleX is going away I thought. Any reason you don’t want to use Signal, or setup XMPP/Jabber/Snikket/Prosody, etc.
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¢.
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.
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
I’m using matrix for years with my wife and my mom, never really had issues, but maybe my requirements are not that high.
My family and friends all use matrix to communicate and works fine for everyone.
Matrix works well for me.
It’s not out yet, but I’d keep an eye on Flatline. It’s by the people who make Molly (Signal client fork—it’s pretty good, been using it for years). Flatline is a Molly-compatible server implementation, i.e. so that you can host your own Signal server. Because generally if someone asked for a “reliable messenger for family use” I’d recommend Signal as a polished and reliable option, though not self-hostable unfortunately.
Just a fair warning: Element (Matrix client) also had issues with notifications not appearing in time, or attachments/images not loading. (This is on a self-hosted Synapse with a handful of people and 1 bridge).
I haven’t kept up much with new developments, but last I remember, hosting the official Element Server Suite Community requires Kubernetes. Third-party servers or some install scripts are an option though.
I’ve had good notifications maybe 2,5 years ago? I don’t remember for how long. Nowadays the notifications are very unreliable (selfhosted, ntfy, any android app).
I have never understood why there is no protocol that allows for multi-master node setup(if a message is written to one, then queue to write to the second one and ignore timestamp missmatchning and conflict resolution(It does not have to be perfect) - matrix put too much effort into this IMO).
For family i use Signal. My coworkers use IRC and I have it setup in link-mode for multi master support(but IRC does not have new features like send image, thread, reactions, emoji, text-styling, audio/video calls). Using unrealircd. Neat when the local city network is up but the fiber connection from the city network to the internet is down so I can still write to some friends, or dont care about uptime on my server since they fallback to the second, free, Oracle VM.
I just think that it sounds way too hard to have a messaging app working nowadays. I mean, from a developer perspective.
I just wished PWA was better integrated with mobile OSes so notifications worked effortlessly. That way, building my own solution would be almost trivial I think.
If I went full .apk style I certainly would miss iOS(no time to waste on Apple SDK or whatever), and Google is day after day hardening the process of installing homemade .apk.
What I am aiming at is that the discussion should not be “which messaging app/service is best according to xyz criteria”, and yes “why building my solution is not trivial?”.(of course I appreciate the current discussion, I just want to expand it)
I self hosted matrix for probably a year after me and some people started getting spam on telegram. It was the first thing I really self hosted beyond jellyfin (and plex before that) so I didn’t really fully understand what was I doing and that could have affected things.
I had a few hurdles that made it not work out for me and my friends/family. First, the end to end encryption, one of the main “selling” points I feel, makes it complicated to sign in for people who don’t care about any of that. You end up getting a code to save, I had to verify them at first, we’d have times where something still showed unverified, etc.
Just started hosting nextcloud recently and I’m also seeing the notification issue, but at least you just sign up and start using it.
I also noticed in matrix we never got notifications for emoji reactions (which we all use with each other). Other notifications were relatively solid though.
I never got webrtc and some stuff working and I sort of lost steam trying, so we could use element or fluffychat but not element X and we couldn’t have big group calls or anything like that. That’s probably on me though, but in fairness nextcloud aio just has a checkbox and all that stuff works.
Since I’m the only dork in my little group interested in this stuff I abandoned matrix when nobody used it.
