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?

  • i_love_FFTEnglish
    1·
    40 minutes 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.