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?

  • ShredderFeeder@shredderfood.netEnglish
    11·
    2 hours ago

    Matrix/Synapse is pretty easy to set up… the encryption is a bit on the kludgy side, but it definitely works… I run it over a cloudflare tunnel (inbound) and perm-VPN tunnel (outbound)

    I can give you a sample docker-compose file I use if you’d like. ;-)

    • LewdLemon@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      5·
      2 hours ago

      Thank you so much for your offer! I’ve actually set it up last night and it’s running fine so far. It’s just that it won’t relay any calls if either of the devices is not on my network. Tunneling back into the network via VPN might be an option, but make it more cumbersome to use for some of the less techy folks around me.

      What’s your primary reason to self-host Synapse? And who do you use it with?

      • ShredderFeeder@shredderfood.netEnglish
        3·
        1 hour ago

        Getting off corporate messaging…I use it for family and friends, people I know personally… But it is fully federated so I can get to some of the groups and such… matrix community servers and the like. :)

        Mostly I started investigating it when Discord started talking about age-verification… Figured it was a good idea to have an exit strategy…