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 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 managed to get my immediate family all on Signal, so that’s my vote!
Me too, all family and friends use signal if they want to chat with me.
Correct. Just use Signal. Problem solved.
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.
I’m using matrix for years with my wife and my mom, never really had issues, but maybe my requirements are not that high.
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.
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 🤷
@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.
That’s pretty cool that you use Matrix for work!
I like the idea of matrix, but I wouldn’t recommend it yet. Maybe after a few more years if the ux improves.
Grandma uses Signal, it looks like a normal texting app, nothing special
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.
Signal or Molly are probably going to be your best bets
Just want to note that Molly IS Signal, just a fork of it with some added features, in case OP isn’t aware. Definitly just go for Signal unless you have a specific reason to use Molly.
I like Molly a lot better personally
Molly still have SMS integration? It use to have ability to act as an SMS/MMS client.
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
Android notifications are notoriously difficult to get right. May I ask how is Nextcloud Talk currently implementing notifications? Is it through ntfy, a background service, or Google’s Firebase? Have you allowed background usage for both the push app and the chat app?
I use Matrix with Continuwuity and Element X, and it’s doable most of the time except for small bugs. If you disable federation, the resource usage should be minimal too. But it also requires a third party for push service which can be unreliable.
On the XMPP side, there is also Snikket which you could look into. It offers both a server (running modified Prosody) and a mobile client (modified Conversations). XMPP can run as an efficient background service on Android, so it’ll receive in-band notifications.
Regardless of options, one of the main problem I’m aware of is that Android variants tend to overkill various background app, leading to missed notifications. I think it’s better to debug on that aspect as well
I believe Nextcloud Talk uses FCM for notifications. The issue doesn’t seem to be on the FCM side, it’s the client marking messages as read incorrectly, or not notifying because it thinks it’s running in the foreground, etc. They’re definitely working on these issues, but my family has lost confidence in it.
I will check out Snikket, thanks!
I ran Snikket for a while a couple of months ago - notifications in the iOS app were late or never arrived till you opened the app.
Seconding the XMPP reccomendation- I run Prosody, which has been rock solid and stays up even when other services I run go down. File sharing, E2EE, reactions, voice and video calls- everything you’d expect from a modern messenger. Cheogram or Conversations are great Android clients, and Monal is the iOS client I’d recommend.
What do you use for desktop?
I wonder why not more people choose XMPP. What do you think?
I use Gajim on Windows and Linux, Dino when I need to call, and Monal on Mac. XMPP is older and less trendy at the moment, and it’s a large, partially fragmented ecosystem- that might hold back mainstream adoption. But it’s the horse I’d bet on long-term.
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Monal (on a mac)
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Marketing, sadly , actually works… plus network-effects
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My family and friends all use matrix to communicate and works fine for everyone.
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.
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.
