After the arrest of Pavel Durov, I wanted to move from Telegram to something end-to-end encrypted. I know Signal is pretty good, but I think it is better to have our messages in my own server.

I have already looked in XMPP, but it required SSL certs and I did not have the mood to configure them.

Do you know any other selfhosted messaging service for a group of 4-5 friends, or an easy way to configure an XMPP server? Or shall I use Signal after all (I don’t really care that much about being selfhosted, I just thought it would be more privacy friendly)?

  • @[email protected]
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    14 hours ago

    Another fun trick you can play is to use a private IP on your public DNS records. This is useful for Jellyfin on Chromecast for instance — it uses 8.8.8.8 for DNS lookup (and ignores your router settings), so it wants a fully qualified domain name. But it has no problem accessing local hosts, so long as it’s from 8.8.8.8’s record.

    • @[email protected]
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      13 hours ago

      I suppose, but then you’re kind of screwed if you want to access Jellyfin outside of your network. I suppose you could use a VPN, but it’s probably easier to just not use the Chromecast (or just accept that it’s going to hit the WAN regardless).

      • @[email protected]
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        13 hours ago

        Yeah I don’t expose Jellyfin over the Internet, so it doesn’t matter for me, and wouldn’t work at all over WAN (unless VPN’d to home network).

        Also, it’s all reverse proxied, and there’s nothing preventing having two Jellyfin hostnames, e.g., jf-local.mydomain.com and jf-public.mydomain.com.

        • @[email protected]
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          23 hours ago

          Then you’re all clear.

          I personally want my Jellyfin to be on the WAN, and I have certain devices on my internal network VPN’d to my VPS, which exposes the services I want to access remotely. But if you don’t need that, using the local addr in your DNS config totally works. Getting TLS certs will be complicated, but you don’t need that anyway if everything is local or over a VPN.

          • @[email protected]
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            227 minutes ago

            Getting TLS certs will be complicated

            I just use Let’s Encrypt with a wildcard domain — same certs for public and private facing domains. I’m sure this isn’t best practice, but it’s mostly just for me so I’m not too worried :)