Hey y’all,
So I keep having this intrusive though that I SO BADLY want to get my anti slop, anti corporate brainwash friends off of fb and start our own social area (with blow and hookers. Actually forget the blow).
My issues: most of them aren’t tech savvy and my setup would have to be solid with little issues. I never post on fb but I basically would Make 1 post inviting everyone to it.
I have a couple synology nas setups. Neither are open to the internet. I have some spare computers as well that could run the server fine.
I know I could potentially just make a server from one of the public instances of matrix but I don’t trust that and it’d be a nightmare if that one went down or something and we had to move again.
Realistically I’d probably get like 10 people to join me. Just a place for local community to hang out and share events etc.
I keep getting stuck on how exactly to go about it. Like I think I’d need tailscale and docker (still dont get what docker really is). I have used tailscale briefly on mobile and it seems to work. But idk. I would also be fine paying a modest sum a year for some pro to host it if that is smarter…
I would consider just using Signal. It isn’t flawless but it is easy yo use and well
Outside of that Nextcloud talk worked well for me a few years ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CSAM Child Sexual Abuse Material NAS Network-Attached Storage VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
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Setting up matrix is fairly easy now, using ansible playbook for contuwunity is just following a few steps and runs fairly light. If you dont need persistent voice channels, group calls and all the extras I prefer xmpp (prosody specifically) its simpler and more robust in my experience,
I’m a bit confused as the initial question was to replace FB but all the comments focus on chat. The addiction to FB will not be solved by chat. I really appreciate what another user said about wasting “social capital”. Don’t go forward with a solution none of them are looking for. Do they want a change?
That said, I set up matrix for my own very technical family for chat, video, and voice calls. Since then I have had 4 “normies” want to join of their own free will and they use it and don’t complain about it.
I feel the world of Matrix I stepped into a few months ago is different than what I read about on Lemmy as people speak of it as a pain, but it has been totally fine and can do everything fb messenger can do accept let you play games together.
After discord started to show their true colors and incompetence I started to look for alternatives. I landed on team speak 6. Very very easy to set up via docker and it’s basically discord at this point.
I like it.
But like others have said. If people do not have the most convenient experience they will not use it.
TS6 can be a little finicky dialing in your mic settings and one guy who is in our community lost his shit because he had to tweak a setting or two every once and a while. We don’t see him much anymore… Oh well.
Why not mumble, no license no user limit AFAIK better quality/latency
Why not use something more “mainstream” so you don’t worry about break/fix, like Signal or Delta Chat?
I use Signal, not Delta, but Delta was recommended to me by others recently.
I’m not really into signal as a social media app. Also it doesnt run in browser and the desktop app is not good from when I tried it. And you need a phone. # and its centralized.
Delta I’ll need to check out
The flipside of Signal is that it is fairly intuitive and easy to use
Centralization has the upside of simplicity
Yes, I get it. But it’s a step in the right direction for getting your friends of FB and mainstream shit. Once they start to see the light, maybe they’ll be interested in moving further away from that stuff.
Centralized, yes, but much easier to manage, more “trusting” for your friends since they might be familiar, and it’s secure AF! They don’t respond to data requests from any gov.
Also, they no longer require a phone number, just $2.99USD from Google Play, which, for you might be not OK, but your friends who happily give shit up it’s NBD.
I’ve inquired about skipping GPS in lieu of a regular donation so you can straight up get the APK.
Your end goal, friend, is noble, and I don’t mean to discourage you or gatekeep. And yet I must strongly advise you to slow your horses before you squander what I’d call your “social capital”, i.e. the willingness of the people close to you to follow your recommendations and try out new things. If they find their user experience greatly lagging behind what they’re used to, not only will they return to the services they were using prior to your suggestion: they will also be less likely to listen to you in the future and meet alternatives with skepticism, if not hostility. (“I’ve tried it and all this other stuff doesn’t work…”)
Thus, you need to make sure that they have an excellent first experience with whatever you throw their way. As a tinkerer, tech enthusiast, privacy advocate, or whatever you want to call yourself, you’re likely willing to accept a great amount of jankiness, pain, and lack of feature parity because you feel you get something more valuable in return. But that is not how most people use computers. Most people do not care about privacy, digital independence or any of the things you may cherish; they want things to “just work”.
And, to put it brutally bluntly (sorry!),
Like I think I’d need tailscale and docker (still dont get what docker really is)
this part alone tells me your solution is unlikely to “just work” for them. These are some basic skills to have if you want to try and compete with a billion-Dollar company and the convenience it provides to your friends.
So, my advice is this: don’t aim for “perfect”, aim for “better”. And basically anything is better than using FB Messenger, Whatsapp, Discord or whatever they may be using. Either go for one of the large public Matrix nodes (Matrix.org is unlikely to go down any time soon…) or move your comms to Signal messenger. Both may not be fully under your control (Signal is centralised, and Matrix nodes might be closed or defederated), but they’re e2ee and so professionally managed that your friends might actually enjoy them, use them on a day-to-day basis, and even pull other people over. That way, you’re also building social capital, so that once you’ve obtained the skill to run your own and get it to the level of polish it needs to have, they’ll be willing to follow you there too.
(If this posting sounds like I’ve learnt this the hard way, that’s because I have. Things are fine now, though: almost my entire social graph is reachable via Signal, and I’m preparing to self-host my own comms.)
I host Matrix and it is unfortunately not suitable to “normies”. There are just too many technical issues. I would recommend Fluxer instead.
But I can also confirm that the hardest part will be convincing your freinds to leave their beloved corporate platforms.
I moved away from matrix myself, too many tech issues, “normies” cannot use it (good fucking luck), all the apps are dookie, the public rooms have a CSAM issue, it was created within AMDOCS before being spun into The Matrix Foundation and I don’t trust AMDOCS, it pisses metadata and you basically have to federate with .org because it’s the “default.”
I’ve moved to Delta Chat, which runs off of Chatmail servers (and you can indeed host your own), the apps are good, It’s so easy your mother could use it (mine does), calls (video/audio) are working, location sharing on android, webXDC apps can be neat, they’re working on metadata (almost 0 iirc) and forward secrecy, it’s pretty good.
How does Deltachat compare to Simplex Chat?
I may not be the best to answer that, I’ve never used simplex. I looked at it in my searching but can’t remember why I decided to try Delta first.
DeltaChat is amazing
Anything better than matrix/prosody server?
Man… I’ve been seriously side eyeing deltachat… but I’ve only just finished setting up XMPP after kicking matrix to the curb, via a brief segue thru IRC.
I just…can’t again. The pain…it burns!
Knowing my luck, deltachat is amazing.
I know the pain lmao, I moved from Signal to XMPP to Matrix back to XMPP and then found Delta. It is pretty good so far though, my favorite part is that “normals” can use it easily if I can get them to install it, the biggest hurdle still is the “normal” people who say “aNoThEr ApP fOr TeXtInG?!?!” but those same people have no problem installing an app for 16 cents off of a McChicken.
Like, not that they’re burnt out on me trying apps, I did my testing with small groups, these are people who had no idea of that struggle, they just ONLY want to use iMessage because they suck and are lazy, they legit said “instead of me installing a free app, you should ditch GrapheneOS and spend a grand on a phone that spies on you.”
Sit down. Let me pour you a drink. Then let us lament the curse of the normie together.
Beratna, tell me…is DeltaChat meeting their needs? Is it easier for you? I have one more migration in me, but i’m tired, beratna. I just walked in to find my youngest watching Netflix (gasp!) instead of the carefully curated media server.
Like a lot of us, I solved an interesting technical problem without accounting for the messy end user problem.
Fortunately, this one can be solved with a little uTorrent and some post-hoc market research and buy in (chocolate).
You’re saying Deltachat gets you more of that then XMPP and Conversations, I’m willing to listen.
It’s meeting their needs so far for sure, the only issue I’ve run into is that I can’t location share with iPhones, but I’m the only one that cares lol.
Definitely look into it before you move, it’s more suited towards family/friends, for instance “group chats” don’t have an admin/mod or anything, all users have the same power and can kick any other user. Technically both matrix and XMPP can do “more” and if you have them already using XMPP it might just be better to stay, in my case I couldn’t get them to use XMPP if I tried lol, “too ugly,” “looks old,” “what the fuck do you mean ‘enable omemo,’” etc.
That’s my favorite part, when I do convince someone to sign up, I just send an invite link, they click it, it opens their app store to DC, and sometimes they have to click it again after they’ve made an acct to get linked to me but they can just handle it, no walkthrough needed.
And they keep focusing on making that easier for me, you can choose your own relays and add multiple for resiliency if one goes down, but that’s out of the scope of the normals to figure out so I just let them do default. Well, with a recent update they now default to using multiple relays from their list instead of just their “default” nine.testrun.org, and soon they plan to auto-upgrade any accts made before the change (accts that only have nine.testrun as a relay). So now I don’t even have to worry about upgrading their accts to add extra relays, they’re going to do it for me!
It’s definitely the easiest secure messenger I’ve used so far. It’s not a discord replacement unfortunately but if you just need a chat app without too much of a focus on groups of strangers, it works. There’s not much of a social media aspect to it (which I see as a positive lol), but there is “channels” (like, I follow a linux news channel on DC), those can be neat.
More importantly, delete uTorrent YESTERDAY, it’s no good anymore since about 2009. The replacement is qBittorrent!
More importantly, delete uTorrent YESTERDAY, it’s no good anymore since about 2009. The replacement is qBittorrent!
Hmm. I think I have the old portable apps version of uTorrent 3.5 on the PC and the Pi (which does all the naughty things) does indeed run qBittorent.
What’s up with uTorrent?
It had a cryptominer for a while, became adware (and possibly outright malware, I abandoned it before then but I’ve heard people say it got worse.)
I run a small invite-only Matrix server for a handful of people, with federation turned off and the admin side reachable only over my Tailscale network. Your friends won’t need Tailscale at all. The usual pattern is a cheap VPS running a reverse proxy that faces the internet and passes traffic back to the box at home, so your NAS never gets opened up. Turning federation off also sidesteps most of the public-room and metadata worries people raised here, since it’s just your group. I also host Cinny next to it so there’s a web version nobody has to install, and I use it with SchildiChat Next on my phone to move files and notes between my PC and phone. For non-tech friends I’d point everyone at FluffyChat or the Cinny link and walk them through saving their recovery key on day one, because that’s where people get stuck.
Same same but no VPS here. I use Tailscale to reach the self hosted XMPP instance, which is containerized. Clients can only reach the XMPP server (directly when on LAN, as white listed devices on Tailscale when not).
It works. The bottleneck is Tailscale, weird issues with Android VPN automation switch over (something about my wife’s Samsung phone really does not like Tailscale. She’s also worried it increases battery drainage when left on) and the fact that using Tailscale instead of VPS is not the moral victory I had hoped for. There’s headscale I suppose, but then I have to deal with self signed certs and…then, and then and then…
It never ends. Problems never end.
I console myself with the fact I’ve made an E2E private family chat service that works without a public-facing server, yet remains accessible outside home with a click of a button. That’s a win.
The problem is that I want it to work as smoothly as a commercial chat service on a shoe string budget, on a Raspberry pi sipping 2W. That and the fact that I’m bloody minded enough to work on it until it does, beyond the point of sanity.
The problem is that I want it to work as smoothly as a commercial chat service on a shoe string budget, on a Raspberry pi sipping 2W. That and the fact that I’m bloody minded enough to work on it until it does, beyond the point of sanity.
You’ve summed up the entire glory and insanity of this sub in two meager sentences. Compression is over 9000.
OVER 9000!
I appreciate you, LewdLemon. Enjoy this DBZ earworm, sent with love.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB5FTZkfXDs
Maybe make it your Matrix / XMPP ring tone or something for maximum suffering.
You don’t need docker or tailscale or any of that crap. Your priority is controlling the service, not having the hardware physically at home: rent a vps and follow the social guidelines in https://runyourown.social/ . You don’t need fancy tech, only concrete social guidance.
Bro, I heard you loud and clear. We don’t need no messenger. We’re in agreement - wind’s already blowing… When are the hookers arriving? 😆
Joke aside 😉 On containers]
Matrix isn’t trivial to host, at least with the official software, and I probably wouldn’t suggest to get into the topic with a “productive” service that’s a bit on the higher level to selfhost.
There’s some providers offering Matrix as a service, but they don’t seem cheap on my quick research.
There’s plenty it collectives offering Matrix for free and honestly them going down is not much more likely than you messing something up. If you don’t trust the smaller ones, you can still simply join matrix.org, which will probably last as long as Matrix is around.
I think with your anti slop, anti corporate friends I’d go for some leftist hobby nerd collective, check out this list: https://riseup.net/en/security/resources/radical-servers
Matrix is indeed not so hard to setup , I have a couple running: one for a company with 50/60 users ( 3/4 years uptime and federated ) with synapse and some bridges and one for friends ( testing tuwunel) . The only important thing to remember is to save your recovery key for when you install another client. ( and in the latest times any decent agent can install and configure it for you )
you could host fluxer! They don’t have federation yet but they will soon, and I think there’s an easy multiple accounts switcher that helps. Fluxer has a nice user experience, closer to discord.
That said I use matrix with the sable or Fluffychat clients and it’s pretty alright, i’ve heard continuwuity is a decent server implementation. Sable has more features/functionality and fluffychat is more mature/stable
