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!
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.
Cool. I do like how sending photos over chat sends a message which doubles as a notification.
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.
You could use it with a local domain. Setting it up would be marginally more tricky, perhaps even easier than a "realx domain, but using would as simple as ever, on that LAN.
May be https://code.briarproject.org/briar, it is ‘absolutely’ local … and global :)
Oooh this looks interesting, what a nice project!
I’ll check it out, but it seems the local part is more of a backup than a primary feature, so not sure if it’ll work for me
Look at LocalSend
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?
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.
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.
