Ok…I think I have this narrowed down. Jami is fine…it’s just that the UnifiedPush / DHT proxy mode is ass. I was using SunUP for UnP. I might need to look at different solution or just accept running in background.

EDIT: tried Ntfy too; I’m 99.9% convinced it just cannot use UnifiedPush properly.

EDIT 2: nope, broke again. Two stikes and you’re out, Jami

I have tried it before, it’s neat, but notifications are not reliable since it is peer to peer (both devices need to be online for a connection), a bit like Briar if you’ve used that before. I don’t think it uses the Tor network, so it might be faster than Briar (but also less anonymous?)

I don’t have experience with the jami daemon though, so can’t comment if that solves the peer to peer issue.

I personally like Matrix the best, since you have federation, options for encrypted chats, self-host able with Continuwuity (or Synapse), lots of alternative clients for nearly every OS (even mobile Linux, you have Fractal! FluffyChat also works but it’s definitely oriented towards Android devices)

I like matrix too but am dealing with weird networking issues, across ancient devices. Issues around MatrixRTC, old android devices, using HTTP vs HTTPS and the like are making me not want to live on this world any more.

Well, there’s also IRC and XMPP. Could those work better for older devices? Dunno, but neither are encrypted, so don’t use them for anything sensitive. Signal is good if you want security, they’ve been audited a lot, but they are based in the U.S. which isn’t great.

I’ve also heard of Stoat (formerly Revolt) and Fluxer, both are relatively new, but I would prefer Matrix over both since it’s more easily self-hostable (+ all those different clients to choose from!)

edit: I really didn’t know, but looks like XMPP does support encryption! (and it’s enabled by default on most clients!)

neither are encrypted, so don’t use them for anything sensitive

I run XMPP - just wanted to say that all major XMPP clients (the ones I’m thinking of are Conversations, Monal, Dino and Gajim, among others) encrypt-by-default, you have to actively go out of your way to disable it per contact.

Oh whoops, I didn’t know that! That’s kind of neat, didn’t know had encryption. I will amend my comment

That’s actually pretty cool, I’ll be making an XMPP account then. Adding to my collection of chat apps!

IRC supports TLS encryption. Many large networks don’t actually have it enabled or use self-signed certs because they still think it’s the 1990’s, but if you make your own server you can use TLS just fine.

So I’m doubly wrong! That’s kind of neat

Not only does XMPP support encryption, it does the same double ratchet encryption scheme which signal uses.

Wait…IRC? As in Internet Relay Chat IRC? Can IRC do video calls now?

It’s been a damn long time since I used mIRC…but it IRC is back / more capable, I will rock that shit like it is literally 1999 again.

You know, I had to do a double take when you mentioned IRC, but it’s actually come a long way since I used it last.

github.com/ergochat/ergo

thelounge.chat

And unlike Jami, it really IS self hosted.

Good idea; thanks for that. I realise IRC doesn’t have native video / audio calling but that’s probably a smaller problem to solve / bolt onto that trying to juggle Matrix across multiple unruly devices

EDIT: … IRC has video and voice calls now?

github.com/AndroidIRCx/AndroidIRCx

Wat

IRC is great. The challenge is picking a client for the family, and getting them set up. It’s not friction free.

Just a little postscript for you, sbird

TL;DR the fam has settled on -

Ergo as IRC server: https://ergo.chat/
The Lounge as PWA IRC client: https://thelounge.chat/
Janus for video calls: https://janus.conf.meetecho.com/index.html
I will host all this on the Pi at my place and they can tailscale in.

So, it looks like ye ancient IRC has saved the day.

Thanks for the suggestion; I never would have thought of it.

PS: I’m tied, boss. Never volunteer.

I like matrix too but am dealing with weird […] issues

The quintessential Matrix experience

Try Matrix, they said. It will be fun, they said.

…

They.

Lied.

Don’t know man, Matrix has been pretty much set and forget for me since 2017 or 2018.

It sounds good but in practice it doesn’t work out; laptops sleep, people put their phones on airplane at night, whatever happens in life. The “best” solutions use some sort of cache-and-forward relay (thinking like DeltaChat relays, or I hear SimpleX is adding them) but I think most end up looking at Snikket (xmpp) or Matrix for the group management etc. on a central server. The Disroot group uses “Movim” which is XMPP highly customized to a social experience.

I use DeltaChat with friends and there’s a lot of things you can’t do because it’s essentially P2P with caching relays - like Jami, all control and data is stored on the device(s). If all you’re looking for is a Signal replacement it’s great (and why we use it), but if you want good group social controls you gotta go the central server route.

I think Jami here could do with caching relays like Delta has, could move this project to the next level.

I think they have that now, thus my interest

docs.jami.net/en_US/user/jami-for-servers.html

I never tried deploying Jami, as I settled on XMPP for this use-case. But, let us know how it goes if you do try it! I haven’t seen many review it before so I’d be interested to hear your experience.

Postscript: it went terribly. That is…it worked perfectly on test devices / with test accounts. Then I thought "ok…this has potential! Then it shat the bed, in a way I couldn’t grok (and frankly, I didn’t have the energy to trouble shoot).

Then I thought “fine…clearly Jami is flaky. LiveKit and MatrixRTC are shitty with Synapse…I know X wants to video call Y…let me try a clean cut over to Continuwuity + Tailscale”.

…and now I hate everything and everyone.

So, that probably means I will try Jami again one more time and then just switch to Snikket.

The moral of the story is: I should have played with dollies as a kid instead of computers, because this exact pattern of fuckery has been the bane of my existence near on half a century now.

Le-fucking-sigh.

Fuck it; I’m going get Claude to set this up. “Claude, take the fucking wheel and make no mistakes.”

Ahhh, sorry to hear it :(

I should have play with dollies as a kid instead of computers

Probably we’d all be happier :)

So, that probably means I will try Jami again one more time and then just switch to Snikket.

Good luck! I hope it goes well

Unlikely…but I will try again. For fun

it’s really not reliable especially for non techies. plus it’s a real p2p so…

just setup XMPP

+1 for xmpp

Yes, sadly I think you’re right. I played around with it a bit today…showed great promise…then uninstalled it and tried to do a fresh install and since then, nada.

snikket.org specifically for a small family server. Much lower maintenance and breakages than Matrix and thus less issues with the family.

Yeah…you know what? I’m going to try that. I’m sick of Jami and I am ready to burn Matrix to the fucking ground and piss on it’s ashes.

Damn

I have successfully set up Synapse Matrix server twice before and it is still a ridiculous convoluted mess. Something like Conduit for Matrix might be better, but progress there is glacial.

Probably less reliable for me as a techie. Every time I opened Jami, my firewall alerts would go off about a device on the network calling to China, Russia, and Vietnam lol. Resulted in it almost never connecting for me since my network just blocked way to many connections on it for outbound traffic.

Can you do an equivalent of matrix bridges on xmpp?

you mean like irc-matrix bridges? i think you can use matterbridge…

It’s 2026… Why do people insist on skipping the fact that XMPP exists?

Anyway. Just set up XMPP.

XMPP died along side XML. Outside of a few greybeards no one really uses it. I’m not sure why Lemmy seems to be so obsessed with a dead technology

TIL, XML ded

xml dead

¿Really? Someone tell that to LibreOffice, they keep using it for their ISO approved file format!

@possiblylinux127 @lambalicious jmp.chat, the only real google voice alternative, is bringing it back.

That sounds interesting. Any ongoing discussion on the subject?

Why does nobody like matrix? I get setup maybe used to be hard but I personally used ansible playbook and its really noon friendly and simple

@Arda @lambalicious because the experience is truly garbage. Not only does it not scale and is slow (I stopped running a server years ago, but the resources it consumed was obnoxious), but the clients often do silly things like say they're waiting for a key refresh so it can't decrypt the message yet. I still have to use it for work unfortunately.

Basically yes. Matrix is in the unfortunate position of being a “nu-protocol”, something that should be good but it is intentionally designed to be bloated and wasteful just so that we (or really, techbros) can have a shiny new toy, instead of using proven, battle-tested technologies and standards that can run in a potato which is all we’ll have access to with how the RAM factories are going.

I only host for my family and me otherwise use public servers, for that my server never consumed much resources at all and I never ran into these key issues people mention. I’ve been hosting it for 6 months. Idk despite it all Matrix just checks all the correct boxes is it not worth using even with the issues you had?

I would be very careful with it as it has a long history of being unstable and hasn’t had a security audit.

Honesty my recommendation would be to use Signal or Molly. While it isn’t the best from a anonymity perspective it is reliable and easy to understand and use

I was never able to get it to work reliably. For those mentioning XMPP, Jami uses a serverless approach with a distributed hash table instead. In principle it has better privacy but in reality it’s flaky. IDK for sure if the flakiness comes from the DHT but either way I gave up. I might try again sometime.

I’ve been hammering it hard rn and it definitely is the Unified Push / DHT proxy. The instant those are disabled, it works reliably. So I may need to revise my position.

The thing that really caught my attention is the jami daemon

docs.jami.net/en_US/user/jami-for-servers.html

If I’m reading that right, it’s sort of like a headless instance that can store and forward. Additionally, it doesn’t require tail-scale / head-scale to do so (as jami has its own protocol). So no nonsense with domains, reverse proxy, certificate infrastructure or public chat service.

The only issue is “it’s not self hosted”, which was part of the brief.

You can self host Jitsi and it’s nice. I haven’t done it yet though.

Good idea. Jitsi, Galene, Janus…it just depends on what runs on my Rpi.

Jitsi is good as an ad hoc communication tool, but it won’t replace a “chat / sms” tool. I took a small peek at SimpleX, and it looks quite complex. Not sure if it really is.

Wow, as someone who has been hosting XMPP for family for 10+ years and only liking it, I’m amazed by the overwhelmingly supportive comments for it, it’s like people are recovering from a Matrix hangover and rediscovering the things they already had for their merit. So yeah that’s my +1: XMPP is really something dependable, it just works, and the sysadmin story is great too (my preference goes to ejabberd for the best “turnkey” experience, but you can’t go wrong with prosody either if you are willing to read some guide).

Simplex chat service anyone?

Quick question after you found happiness using IRC: was xmpp not enough ? I’m genuinely curious in case I need something like this

It wasn’t interoperable enough with the wide cornucopia of devices in the group. We’re talking Mac, pc, android 6 thru to 15 and a few more besides.

It wasn’t that XMPP was incapable, it’s that the client matrix was too uneven across the wide range of devices I needed to support.

IRC was simpler, lighter, easier to diagnose, and had clients for basically everything. Plus most of us were familiar with IRC from back in the day.

I also already had Janus for video chat set up, plus Tailscale already hooked into the pi, so most of XMPP’s extra machinery solved problems I no longer had.

TL; DR easier to host on pi, easier for client devices, less moving parts.

Personally, I just really like the look and feel of motd

Yeah I’m using motd as well and it’s the best one, I only wish it wasn’t made with AI…

XMPP is not good. The clients are poor. The core server requires a bunch of extensions to do basic stuff like sync history with clients. I have my gripes with Matrix but I ran right back to it after trying xmpp for a month. Yes I tried the distros etc etc, the stack is too old and people aren’t modernizing it.

I don’t understand why people keep bringing it up as if it is a viable modern replacement for Matrix, it isn’t.

Are text message and group chats not acceptable anymore?

Sir, this is !self hosted.

I will see myself out