Best FOSS Local Messenger Service?

shufflerofrocks@beehaw.org to Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org – 13 points –

So I want to setup a messaging server in my home that works like Telegram or Whatsapp - it should use the local network as we plan on moving around a lot of photos and files between our devices for some projects

What should I use? XMPP? Or Matrix? Or is there something else that's ideal for local networks?

Thanks!

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I'm curious to learn of other people's workflows. May I ask why you prefer to send files over messenger instead of using a shared local file storage?

Mostly it's because we're using Telegram for our workflow and everyone is pretty used to it by now (including our parents, who're slow to adapt).

We're gonna be sharing videos, photos, and files on an hourly basis, and not every person is invovled with the every other person's workflow. If it could ideally be a messenger, we would have conversations regarding these files, and the chat history+notifications on new file upload would be pretty nice.

Then it sounds like Matrix is what you want. It can send files just fine and I use it for that all the time.

You may want to set up some kind of cleanup for media storage, as the files would stay on the server even after being sent and received, otherwise, slowly filling it up.

If you have a ton of storage and the files are reasonably small, you might be be fine without that, but look into it, at least.

Matrix doesn't really work without a public domain name and so on. Maybe this will change in the future with their p2p experiments, but right now it is not a good suggestion for a local only solution.

It's not a messenger, but for locally frequently transferring or syncing a lot of data, I can recommend syncthing. You can use it to configure shared directories, syncthing will use the local network as available (or you can force it to) to transfer files across the devices. We use it for keeping some media, notes, password databases and documents in sync over a bunch of devices. :)

I think you need to think about what you want very clearly. For example, transferring files and other data between devices screams Nextcloud. My wife and I have a local Nextcloud instance on our media center that we use to sync calendars, address books, tasks, notes, and files in general. Way useful. Some people said syncthing. My big reservation is, can you find easy to use apps (I have not though maybe they exist). The big advantage of syncthing it can do NAT traversal and you do not need any server infrastructure.

On the other hand you said you want chat. So then yes, chat sounds interesting instead, not what we do. I will leave the others to talk about chat because there are so many options and I am not a big chat guy. By the way for chat, Signal does have some sort of group chat option. That is really my only input.

I would think about where your users are. If your stuff is on your LAN, then this means a few things. First you server will not have a globally routeable IP address or domain, so every device has to be on the LAN. If for example your parents do not live with you this is kind of out. Also people talked about domain names. Domain names are not the problem. You can always put a DNS server on your LAN (often your boundary router can do this), and add your server and domain to it. What is a problem is TLS Certificates. Generally android devices have problems with non-standard CAs and probably self-signed certs. So one has to think how they are going to do that. Other option is to have a VPS at a place like Linode for example. Then your server is on the internet, but then you have to maintain it and in particular keep it patched and secured which can be challenging.

Anyway, some things I did not see others say.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Yeah, I plan for this to be a LAN thing only, we're all currently living in the same house, and only need it when we're working indoors here, so it shouldn't be an issue.

I'm currently setting up nextcloud, as it's file transfer is impeccable, and it has a somewhat-functional chat feature. I have been having a little problem setting up the domain name + certificate - I would love to configure this to an internal IP but it seems that's not allowed for some reason - nextcloud documentation is suggesting a reverse proxy for setting up a local instance which seems like .... double the work? I'll try that if nothing else works out, and I'm gonna try it with a self-signed certificate for now, if that fails I'm not sure

The way I setup the domain name was to buy a domain from Namecheap for use for "private" and LAN use. Then I assigned my server to a subdomain of that. Then I setup my VPS that I have at Linode to also host that subdomain too and to mint a LetsEncrypt cert for it and keep the cert up to date. Then periodically I have my local server fetch the cert from my VPS.

There may be other ways. Maybe using port forwarding and dynamic DNS would have worked. Maybe I could have shelled out money and purchased a domain signing cert from say Digicert. I use to use my own CA and add it to my devices. Linux and maybe Windows too allows that but not Android, so that is why I purchased a domain and went through the drama minting a real cert. Also could have added my server as a subdomain of one I already had, but wanted my "private" stuff on a different domain then my public server for a little more privacy and long term flexibility. Also did not want to use port forwarding and dynamic DNS for security reasons though I think could have.

Two ideas:

  1. xmpp works, but the domain needs to resolve correctly. I'd just use a free domain that you point at the server LAN ip, plus an acme client that can do a dns challenge. Prosody is pretty bulletproof and very lightweight.

  2. deltachat + email. Set up a little IMAP server for the lan and use Delta chat to create a messaging over it. Or just use an email client.

If you want something relatively idiot proof you could set up a local Nextcloud server that automatically syncs the photo from the devices and let's you share them directly or via the built in Nextcloud Talk chat app.

Seems to fit all my needs, the talk app looks a little dull, but I think it will be pretty functional for our needs

I also found Mattermost and Rocketchat while looking up nextcloud, and they seem promising too. Any idea about them?

I've set up an XMPP server a few years ago. It worked beautifully!

XMPP sounds great, but I heard it has difficulty with file transfer. How was your experience with it?

xmpp has a number of file transfer modes. http upload has been smooth sailing for me. It uploads the file to the server and holds it according to a retention period you configure. Shows up in the client you sent it to.

Hmm, that actually sounds manageable, as I don't plan on storing the files on server for a long time. Only issue is the notifications part I think, not sure how to configure that . I'll check it out

Notification works like any other message. http upload is just the method the client uses - it's more or less transparent to the clients involved. It's still sending and receiving as you would expect from a messenger.

Its not really designed for sharing large files and storing them, but it is not hard to get working.

However XMPP works better with a domain name and such, for a purely local solution something p2p or a local NAS is much better. Syncthing is probably the easiest to get going.

Ahhh

I use Syncthing already for a lot of my stuff, but it doesn't fit the bill right now. I've been reading about Matrix while looking around for this, do you have any experience with it?

Yes, don't bother with it for this specific use-case.

I've not used it as FTP as it wasn't built for that. It was, however, brilliant for messaging. In regards to some comment below about the domain - you could always spin up a little unbound instance (+wireguard for your own stuff everywhere).

If you’re moving primarily files, I’d probably use Synthing, which is easy to set up for several devices and is really good at syncing files. If you need to be sending messages like a chat, then you might have some luck with Berty, which can work over local Wi-Fi or Bluetooth; though it is in beta.