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?

  • Scott@lem.free.asEnglish
    8·
    7 days ago

    I run a complete, self-hosted Matrix stack including bridges to WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram and Signal as well as Element Call (Livekit) and MAS (the new authentication system).

    I don’t think there’s any shortcuts. You just need to install them and work through any issues, one-by-one. Start with just the homeserver (Synapse, don’t bother with anything else yet) and add one component at a time and get it working before moving to the next.

    I will say that having a decent knowledge of reverse proxies, networking, DNS and certificates will help you greatly. Having a solid understanding of Docker (if you’re using Docker) would be of great benefit too.

    It should be much easier today than it was five/six-odd years ago when I started; things are more polished now than they were then.