Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Self-Hosted Beeper Alternative (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 5 days ago by bonsai@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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?

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[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I'm hosting my own server and my own bridges. Some of the bridges are rock solid and I never need to do anything other than keeping them updated like the discord, the signal, the Telegram and Slack ones.

Others I installed but they are breaking now and then and I have to fiddle with them like FB messanger, WhatsApp.

The third category is the ones that theoretically should work but I can't get them to work like WeChat or Kakao Chat, because they are in a bad shape, outdated or like in WeChats case my account is flagged to not be able to do that for some reason.

And then there are the chats which have no way to be integrated like Instagram I think.

From what I understand beeper is just a matrix server with all those bridges installed and they configure update and run them making shire that everything works. And to be honest, that is a lot of work and it's a good value proposition.

But yes you're right they need to decrypt your chats on their server so that the bridge can deliver the messages. Actually I made a video explaining it a while ago about Element One which is doing it in the same way: https://tube.jeena.net/w/rYhp4ZT5Ykw1aBGqMr62KG

[–] breadguy@kbin.earth 2 points 5 days ago

the meta stuff (fb messenger, ig, whatsapp) always have issues. bridges get flagged as bots, service goes down, etc