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?
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Looking at self-hosting I would rather go with chatmail, part of the deltachat ecosystem. Contrary to others the account doesn’t live on the server but on devices: a server going down merely affects connectivity, not the whole identity. Moreover servers are made to be redundant such that messages can transit through pretty much any of them. So when one goes down the app switches to another one and the downtime is invisible
Matrix is the most popular one these days, and it’s worth considering just for that reason, but it is also extremely buggy and slow. I can’t tell you how many timed I’ve been booted and locked out of my own account, or someone sends me a message, only to receive “message cannot be decrypted” error.
If you’re starting something new that you’re bringing other people to, I’d very much recommend DeltaChat/ArcaneChat (chatmail). It’s been far more reliable and easier to use.
1 - great username, 2 - I no longer have these issues with my setup, been running for 5 years now (but an update seems to have broken Element Call
Self-hosted messaging was solved decades ago, it’s called XMPP or Jabber depending on who do you ask. There are a number of services for it, such as Prosody or ejabberd, and there are both client apps (eg.: Conversations for Android, Gajim or Dino for PC) and a number of webclients (such as converse.js which can actually be shipped via a ejabberd install).
That said you could just set up an alternative Signal client that allows for custom servers, since the centralization of Signal only really exists at the level of the client only connecting to Signal’s servers… Signal’s people have pointed this out themselves, when offering bridge setups so that people could connect from Iran or other countries where those countries blocked Signal’s endpoints.
+1 for prosody. But you’ll still probably need a turnserver for calls, won’t you?
The answer is always matrix (it has bridges) and a couple people say XMPP.
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. ;-)
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?
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…
If you’re going with Matrix, consider looking at Synapse alternatives. Synapse is by a huge margin the heaviest of the backends to run and it doesn’t really get you anything extra.
introducing:
- dendrite: basically dead
- conduit: slow development, still beta
- conduwuit: dead fork of conduit
- tuwunel: active fork of conduwuit
- continuwuity: another active fork of conduwuit
- conduwuit: dead fork of conduit
Stuck in this software development hell of silly little projects.
@benno Meanwhile Prosody remains awesome, and the Snikket fork makes it even better.
Snikket is more like a distribution than a fork. It’s basically prosody with plugins and and configs.
Ah, but container-impaired. That’s too bad.
You can install the stack in an LXC container and take snapshots instead. Incus makes managing that very easy.
App stack in a system container + snapshots is a different approach from stack of app containers that you provision/tear-down but it gets you most of the same advantages.
Bit of time needed to re-learn Docker concepts in another form but I think it’s a good tool to have on your belt. Sometimes apps aren’t available for Docker, or they ship very poorly made images, or you simply feel that a system container that you upgrade in-place is the better fit.
Oh and Incus can also do VMs (KVM) with the exact same command interface as for LXC so you get that option too at the cost of learning one tool.
Any recommendations?
I host a matrix tuwunel server and can recommend it.
My motivations are that it gives greater control, and i think federated platforms are better.
I have it set up on a hetzner vps running debian, which tuwunel provides an official package for.
I prefer XMPP, its very simple unlike Matrix and I set up a prosody server.
