> Most of my contacts made the switch, and I’m now at roughly 95% Signal for day-to-day conversations

Years ago, I set up a Matrix server. I got some people to migrate, but ultimately even my husband stopped using it because the UI and accessibility of all the applications was so poor (and he has very bad eyesight, so this was a dealbreaker)

Looking for another alternative, I ended up with Telegram. It was pretty open, easy to work with, had great UI and even a ton of funny stickers and emojis, so I got nearly all my friends to migrate. I did NOT go for Signal because I do not need end-to-end encryption all the time, and having all the same conversations available on my desktop as well as on my phone was important, and still is. Unfortunately, it's also run by a severe weirdo.

So yeah, I'm not really sure what to use now.

Snikket ( https://snikket.org/ ) is an easier way to self-host an XMPP server. It's a pre-configured Prosody server in a docker image, and you can use it with any XMPP client you like.

> I still use Signal for most day-to-day conversations and I’m not planning to stop.

You can run a Signal-XMPP gateway. See https://slidge.im/

This will allow you to use your Signal account from your XMPP client. Bridging audio / video calls isn't currently possible. But most other feature work across the gateway.

> OMEMO is built on the same encryption that Signal uses, so I’m comfortable trusting it.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't trust OMEMO (we all have our own threat models), but OMEMO and Signal have fewer similarities that people often assume and has some important caveats [0].

[0] https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/

I've been hosting a ejabberd instance for a few people for almost a decade now. It just works, takes close to no resources and needs almost no maintenance - just some trivial config checkups when migrating to newer major releases.

Around the same time I tried hosting a Matrix server with Synapse, but quickly stopped. It consumed a lot of resources when doing almost nothing, and it stopped running after an upgrade with some non-obvious error message, so instead of reanimating it I just abandoned it and moved to matrix.org with my personal account.

I've run an XMPP server in various states of professionalism for around 20 years now. From mom's basement all the way to a colocated server with a similar setup that's described in the post.

The only caveat I have not been able to solve is hosting an xmpp server for a different domain, like it's possible with email.

A client connecting the account joe.doe@example.ORG will find the server it wants to connect to via SRV to be , e.g., xmpp14.example.COM and expect a TLS certificate for "example.ORG" which that server does not have (nor can/should easily get) - which makes sense in a lot of ways, but limits the ways one can offer hosting services.

If anyone has creative solutions I'm all ears.

I don’t know. The only good solution would be if all messaging apps used the same protocol so everyone could be reached. But right now it is a mess. We can’t even message each other easily. It’s ridiculous. But what am I talking about? We can’t even agree on the same measurement units.

XMPP has been great to run on NixOS… the servers uses so few resources compared to something extremely heavy like Matrix. The Movim client has been wonderful too allowing users to have calls/sharing from chatrooms (MUCs)—supporting a pretty new XEP in the XMPP space—which means there’s no good reason to be on Discord anymore if you care about the freedom/privacy of yourself & your communities.

I’ve been running a matrix server for about 2 years for family. It’s… ok. Clients are bad. Right now nobody on iOS can send images because there is a bug in fluffychat preventing it. Kinda defeats the purpose of a chat for sharing baby pictures. Synapse is a beast. It’s basically taken over my entire VPS.

Joining rooms of various FOSS projects has been nice, but honestly I wish they’d all just stick to libera.chat

This article makes me wonder why we collectively ditched xmpp for matrix when it seems like the protocol is still miles ahead?

I ran ejabberd, later prosody for a while. Eventually I stopped because the contacts went away and it was just not easy enough to set up for ordinary people.

Sad because the idea of running a federated chat service for your family and them having all their contacts there, is great from a data ownership point of view.

Went back to use a mix of WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and Messenger because apparently there is always some people not wanting to use one or the other service, or only using one of them.

Google Talk and Facebook Messenger both used to be XMPP, and I used Pidgin for both, wonderful times...

If the premise contributing to the conclusion to run their own chat service is:

> But Signal is still one company running one service. If they shut down tomorrow or change direction, I’m back to square one.

Aren't they in the same boat now with Cloudflare and Let's Encrypt?

Give me linux-> mobile voice call and linux-> Linux screen share and I would be happy.

Also plugin for gif selector.

But other than that, my ejabberd instance has been running for years with no effort.

Buried here is the fact that Gajim seems to have had big updates lately. I might just switch back to XMPP from Matrix, as all the matrix clients on Linux suck frankly. Conversations on Android is significantly better than any Matrix client I've used.

Hosting chat infrastructure is surprisingly hard, but the real challenges emerge beyond C10K+ scale.

So self-hosting federated instances like this is pretty interesting way to scale.