For people running a family chat in their #selfhosted #homelab: What is the system with the best mobile experience (both Android and iOS)? I’ve been using mattermost, but my family is not super excited about it. I’m thinking of running something else instead, but I don’t want to test every single platform available
Matrix is a well-known self-hosted messenger. I use it for years now.
Matrix, with the Element app on phones.
I use a self hosted XMPP stack with ejabberd as server and conversations.im for mobile apps. I have audio and video calls and tons of features built-in into xmp. There is a huge selection of apps for all platforms.
XMPP is a battle tested protocol that all major messaging apps use underneath.
I used Matrix a few years ago for a full year. I dropped it and never came back. It is a bloated solution to a problem that was already soled with xmpp.
I programmed a bot that is shared with a private room that provides commands such as archiving websites with archiveit or yt videos with YouTubeArchiver
I am planning however to migrate from Ejabberd to Prosody as I would like to easilly hack on the source code or extension and Ejabberd is Erlang with a very rigid stack.
Doesn’t xmpp require a constant connection?
I never really understood why people here push XMPP so hard. It is fragmented as a protocol and lacks mainstream apps and servers.
I think something like Nextcloud Talk or Simplex Chat would be much better
Because it’s an open and decentralized protocol in the same vein as email. It is the most likely to survive in the longterm as it’s not tied to a single entity.
Fragmentation is inevitable in a decentralized protocol. Look at email or http servers, there is no standard mainstream app but a standard extensible protocol, that’s how the internet was originally designed to grow. Now that corporations are pushing their own protocols, they have an incentive to lock users in their ecosystem.
How many people know the ends and outs of the https protocol?
I think that is generally pretty bad for a messaging app
Signal
Yeah, for chat I’ve tried a few systems but honestly I already had signal, they understand that signal chats aren’t texting, the privacy is important to me, and most of all… why rock the boat?
It’s not self-hosted yeah yeah but not everything needs to be. Password management, todo lists, calendar and contacts, grocery lists… sure yeah. But nothing for chat really struck me. And I don’t want to teach everyone how it works just to test a ‘maybe’ alternative.
Family is happy with Matrix (Synapse) and Element as clients. Have members with iOS and Android, smooth experience for all users. But, to be fair, I do have easy users: they basically just send texts, emojis and an occasional picture.
I did not like the admin side of things too much so far, but I recently migrated to a Docker setup, which seems easier to maintain.
