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!

  • pienz@feddit.orgEnglish
    311·
    13 days ago

    Grandma uses Signal, it looks like a normal texting app, nothing special

    • Joelk111@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      12 days ago

      Just want to note that Molly IS Signal, just a fork of it with some added features, in case OP isn’t aware. Definitly just go for Signal unless you have a specific reason to use Molly.

      • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        8 days ago

        molly has support for unifiedpush, the new messagd ping does not need togo through google. it also has better multi device support, and is available through f-droid with their own repo. location sharing uses osm instead of google maps, but of course signal users will still hand over your shared location data to google

  • surpador@programming.devEnglish
    10·
    11 days ago

    Seconding the XMPP reccomendation- I run Prosody, which has been rock solid and stays up even when other services I run go down. File sharing, E2EE, reactions, voice and video calls- everything you’d expect from a modern messenger. Cheogram or Conversations are great Android clients, and Monal is the iOS client I’d recommend.

  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    12 days ago

    I’ve been doing research on this and came down to two.

    1. simplex
    2. 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.

  • Willdrick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    10 days ago

    Make sure the app is set to “unrestricted” under battery settings. Most phones get really aggressive nuking down stuff that is not from FAANG

  • communism@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    12 days ago

    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.

  • AbidanYre@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    13 days ago

    SimpleX is pretty good if you’re looking for a signal/sms replacement rather than something slack-like

  • Tolstoy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    13 days ago

    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

  • Bongles@lemmy.zipEnglish
    2·
    12 days ago

    I self hosted matrix for probably a year after me and some people started getting spam on telegram. It was the first thing I really self hosted beyond jellyfin (and plex before that) so I didn’t really fully understand what was I doing and that could have affected things.

    I had a few hurdles that made it not work out for me and my friends/family. First, the end to end encryption, one of the main “selling” points I feel, makes it complicated to sign in for people who don’t care about any of that. You end up getting a code to save, I had to verify them at first, we’d have times where something still showed unverified, etc.

    Just started hosting nextcloud recently and I’m also seeing the notification issue, but at least you just sign up and start using it.

    I also noticed in matrix we never got notifications for emoji reactions (which we all use with each other). Other notifications were relatively solid though.

    I never got webrtc and some stuff working and I sort of lost steam trying, so we could use element or fluffychat but not element X and we couldn’t have big group calls or anything like that. That’s probably on me though, but in fairness nextcloud aio just has a checkbox and all that stuff works.

    Since I’m the only dork in my little group interested in this stuff I abandoned matrix when nobody used it.

  • metalua@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    11 days ago

    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)