I’m currently using Beeper to conglomerate the plethora of chat services that my friends and family use: WhatsApp, FB Messenger, RCS/SMS, and Discord. I use Signal separately because I read that Beeper needs to decrypt incoming messages before reencrypting and routing, so I felt adding a bridge for Signal defeated the purpose of using Signal.

I’ve also read that Beeper is essentially just Matrix with a bunch of bridges, so I looked into self-hosting Matrix and standing up those bridges myself. I would feel comfortable integrating Signal into a self-hosted instance where I control and can encrypt the middleware.

What would you all recommend as a viable, self-hosted alternative to replace Beeper? I’ve been trying to set up Matrix but running into a lot of headache with no simple way to self-host it. Yes, I’ve tried the Ansible set up and I get countless issues. I’ve heard an XMPP server might be a better solution as it is more lightweight and battle-tested? How do XMPP gateways compare to Matrix bridges, and would they cover all my needs?