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?

  • LewdLemon@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
    1·
    22 hours ago

    but if message are not encrypted during transit it’s bad.

    I did not say that. ;) If you’ve secured your connection via SSL (which Nextcloud AIO forces you to do anyway), messages are encrypted in transit.

    I said they’re not end-to-end encrypted, i.e. they’re stored on the server without encryption. To be fair, in theory, this is less of an issue if you’re the one hosting the service.

    Strangely, on complain I received about signal was that they found it hard to save the pictures and videos shared on it

    That is somewhat true. Messengers like Telegram (yuck!) and (correct me if I’m wrong!) even Meta’s Whatsapp (doubleyuck!) do or at least can store all media unencrypted on the device in a folder. Signal does not do this. Every single pic/vid/whatever needs to explicitly be stored in device memory in encrypted form (there’s even a nag screen every time you do this). Also Signal does no appear to have an option so it will store media in encrypted format to the device storage. (Just looked, didn’t find anything of that kind.)

    With nextcloud talk, I would expect all the shared files to be available on the cloud drive.

    That might be correct. When you install it, Talk stubbornly creates a “Talk” folder in your NC files, which is likely to hold all media shared via Talk.

    • i_love_FFT@jlai.luEnglish
      2·
      10 hours ago

      Yeah, from this behaviour, it really seems like Talk is a substitute for MS Teams rather than a social chat platform. On Teams, any file shared in a chat session is actually stored in the sender’s OneDrive account and a shared link is sent.

      I suppose if I wanted to host this as a chat server, I would need to make it very clear to my users that I do have access (at least technically) to their chat session, just like my job’s IT technically have access to our teams chat.