Okay, I admit it. I don’t have friends.
None that I can’t text, call, or email for sure.
And if all your friends are hyper focused on tech and decentralization and open source software, they should have no problem switching!
If, on the other hand, you have friends who fall into the rest of the 99.9% of society, they will react like you suggested they replace all their meals with raw potatoes.
0.1% is generous. It’s much smaller.
True, most normies probably don’t even see any issue with Discord’s ID. They’ll just do it when it pops on their screen, and move on with their lives.
I’m in the process of getting this going in my lab. I appreciate these efforts to find alternatives.
That being said, can I get some opinions so I can pare down the list?
Would be great to have E2EE and audio. Video bonus. I don’t think I’ve got much in the way of preferences beyond that.
My latest leaning is hosting the Matrix protocol.
Also the only friends I have that would be willing to move off the easy corporate software are tech literate, so I have the option to distribute VPN confs and the like. Has anyone hosted chat over their own VPN, or does that just become a mess because STUN/TURN needs to be “free”?
(Sorry I’m still learning a lot here)
TURN server doesn’t need to be free, you just need everyone to be able to access it.
The product I work on in my 9to5 would be perfect for your use case from the technical side of things but sadly the commercial side is a completely different story that makes it not even worth recommending.
I quite like Nextcloud with Talk (spreed), but it’s a whole cloud suite. Nextcloud is E2EE, and NC Talk does text, voice, and video. The phone apps are nice too. The only problem is connecting more than 2-3 people in a voice/video call can be a bit much, so they recommend a high-performance backend (either a paid service, or annoying to set up yourself). It might be overkill if you don’t also use Nextcloud’s other applications, but I use a lot of them extensively, especially when feeding CalDav calendars etc into Home Assistant. Friends making an account on your nextcloud is pretty trivial, even for people who aren’t technical. I use the VM hooked to dedyn io for outside access, and it was all very easy to set up. I’ve had it running for about 6 years now, and only had a problem updating for a while, but it was resolved by the community forums.
snikket is pretty slick. omemo is worrisome though
OMEMO is better than nothing. Much better than OTR or PGP (looking at you DeltaChat), and the biggest problem seems to be the metadata and old versions used in some clients. The encryption (of message contents) at the very least is decent.
OMEMO is better than Matrix’s encryption, which the later doesnt offer proper forward secrecy and breaks all the time leaving messages inaccessible.
oh that makes me excited! i was worried my bugging the fam may have been a waste, or not as useful as id hoped
It still isnt great. Better than DeltaChat/Matrix but decently worse than Signal’s security.
If you want to go super de-centralised. Just remove the internet and go for a mesh network :P
Im confused by this list. It includes the matrix server implementations synapse and continuwuity, but not matrix itself or any of its clients. The only matrix client that could reasonably replace discord is element but its not even there.
The whole website and list is dedicated for self hosting solutions. Unless it’s peer to peer, any client apps aren’t really the self host-able part, so it only makes sense to include the server side of the software.
I think you’re just confused about how Matrix works.
Synapse is Matrix itself. It is the reference home server implementation.
Matrix itself isn’t a thing, Matrix is a spec/protocol. Synapse and continuwuity are implementations of the server, with synapse being the “reference implementation.” Client apps like Element (the reference client) would be good to have there, but I’m not sure selfh.st will want to list clients because there is quite a few.
Synapse is the backend that you install on the server. Element is the client that connect to your backend. Now Matrix has many backends and many clients. Synapse + Element is probably the best fully-featured combo that we have, but also the most complicated.
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Short list. Do I need a plug-in that isn’t mentioned because UX is dead?
