Comment on Self-hosting messenger infrastructure
LewdLemon@sh.itjust.works 1 day agoI have also tried to set that up. However:
- it’s not e2ee. Encryption is “experimental” for now, and didn’t work for me.
- it also requires a TURN server for cross-network calls and had some very weird issues on my degoogled devices (i.e. no notifications for messages or incoming calls).
That’s why I ditched it for now.
Good to know! I intended to sst it up on my Yunohost server such that it’s all locally stored. I would be using it for close family messages only, but if message are not encrypted during transit it’s bad.
Strangely, on complain I received about signal was that they found it hard to save the pictures and videos shared on it (to preserve like old photo albums would). With nextcloud talk, I would expect all the shared files to be available on the cloud drive.
LewdLemon@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I did not say that. ;) If you’ve secured your connection via SSL (which Nextcloud AIO forces you to do anyway), messages are encrypted in transit.
I said they’re not end-to-end encrypted, i.e. they’re stored on the server without encryption. To be fair, in theory, this is less of an issue if you’re the one hosting the service.
That is somewhat true. Messengers like Telegram (yuck!) and (correct me if I’m wrong!) even Meta’s Whatsapp (doubleyuck!) do or at least can store all media unencrypted on the device in a folder. Signal does not do this. Every single pic/vid/whatever needs to explicitly be stored in device memory in encrypted form (there’s even a nag screen every time you do this). Also Signal does no appear to have an option so it will store media in encrypted format to the device storage. (Just looked, didn’t find anything of that kind.)
That might be correct. When you install it, Talk stubbornly creates a “Talk” folder in your NC files, which is likely to hold all media shared via Talk.
Yeah, from this behaviour, it really seems like Talk is a substitute for MS Teams rather than a social chat platform. On Teams, any file shared in a chat session is actually stored in the sender’s OneDrive account and a shared link is sent.
I suppose if I wanted to host this as a chat server, I would need to make it very clear to my users that I do have access (at least technically) to their chat session, just like my job’s IT technically have access to our teams chat.