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’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.
Matrix works well for me.
It’s not out yet, but I’d keep an eye on Flatline. It’s by the people who make Molly (Signal client fork—it’s pretty good, been using it for years). Flatline is a Molly-compatible server implementation, i.e. so that you can host your own Signal server. Because generally if someone asked for a “reliable messenger for family use” I’d recommend Signal as a polished and reliable option, though not self-hostable unfortunately.
SimpleX is pretty good if you’re looking for a signal/sms replacement rather than something slack-like
We use synapse (Matrix). Its stability is great but we have stable internet and backup power so…
Buddy is selfhostig Matrix via Element server suite community edition and using element X on android as well as the normal element app on desktop. Never missed a notification, never
