this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
104 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

46677 readers
2003 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm looking for something that can do chat, video calling with support for guess links and chats. I need it to work in the browser so I can send people a link to a chat session. Bonus if it has a simple mobile app and calendar integration.

Anyone know of something that isn't Nextcloud Chat?

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago

Matrix with the Jitsi meet plugin.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago
[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 week ago (3 children)

There is no way to do what teams does without significant infrastructure. Same with Slack and others.

If you want something that just gets close to the mark, look at Jitsi. It's about as complete as you could expect for just video/voice.

What you may not understand about conferencing platforms is that they are dozens of different hosted services working together to provide a cohesive UE. Video, SIP, VOIP, auth, identity...these are all separate services that are deployed as microservices to get what you get. If you find the bare minimum of the services you actually need, you can probably cobble something together, but it's not going to be a simple running of one service to get the same experience.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I'm hosting a matrix server with a TURN server and it's fairly easy to selfhost. This sounds exaggerated.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That just covers voice/video. OP is asking about a lot more.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

And chat. But yeah, no groupware.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Video+chat is all I'm wanting for the most part

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Do you need Element for that? Also is there a way to do guest access with a link?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

You can allow guest accounts, although it’s disabled by default in synapse.

Call supports depends on the client you’re using. Element is usually ahead in features implementation, but you can get a list of clients and filter by features in the matrix website.

Also I’m not sure what the other person meant by easy to setup. Matrix servers are notoriously hard to setup when compared to anything most things you would find yourself selfhosting, specially with WebRTC/TURN. I think there’s an ansible playbook somewhere, but I never tried it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (4 children)

It isn't that hard. All I'm looking for is a chat/video call service. Jitsi is close but it purely does video calling. I want something that is a chat where guests can join a group with a link. That shouldn't take much. (It didn't with Nextcloud)

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Well if "it shouldn't take much", then it shouldn't be hard to find a solution, right?

I'm now wondering why you're here asking this question if you fully understand what you're asking about.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It’s not hard. Just Teams but self-hosted. Free would be ideal.

/s

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Right? I just want to self-host something like Google and all their services, but free. It also has to run on an AMD K6-2 with 1GB of DDR1 RAM and under 20GB for storage. Please don't ask me any questions, I know exactly what I'm doing.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Uhm actually the k6-2 took EDO or SDRAM. You won't get it running with DDR.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Then write a howto instead of asking here. That shouldn't take much.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Jitsi is close but it purely does video calling.

Not sure what you mean by that. Turn off the camera and you've got an audio chat.

I want something that is a chat where guests can join a group with a link.

That's exactly how Jitsi works.

Signal is not self hosted but they also support videoconference style calls.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Jitsi is closer to Zoom than anything else

I'm looking for the chat plus the ability to start a call

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago

You want either mattermost or the whole matrix stack (backend, plus element with voice/video calls).

Matrix/Element is more of a discord alternative, whereas mattermost tries to be more of a slack alternative, where it seems to have some calendar integrations.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I haven’t tried it myself but Mattermost offers most of what you’re looking for.

https://github.com/mattermost

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I think a gitlab install has most of mattermost inside it, and that means installation and updates are handled. I found the install of MatterMost via its devs used to be very naive, but the gitlab people did something right in vendoring it into their massive install. Gitlab-ce is bloated as heck, but it's fire-and-forget on the proper platform and may allow inter-org linking with or without the matter bridge thing (which itself affords some interoperability).

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Check out Big Blue Button - https://demo.bigbluebutton.org/

Their website talks all about using it for teaching students but it's really just like Jitsi with more features.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Big bluebutton is now integrated into Canvas, an open source learning management software (LMS) that every school I have went to has used.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Self hosting allows you to improve screen share framerate

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

We use this at work. Great for screen sharing and video chat

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I have not tried Matrix yet but I hear it's a good replacement, fashioned more to the likes of Discord but I think it has everything you're looking for

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

I think Mattermost is intended to be just that.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

I've been using self-hosted Jitsi Meet for a few weeks now. Works perfectly. Haven't tried the calendar feature, though.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] theotherbelow 1 points 6 days ago

I would suggest avoiding anything that is a "community" or "personal use only". If its not fully open its not worth it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Huly is pretty amazing and has a self host option. It supports chats and video calls, team rooms, and has some cool integration for speech to text note taking. It also functions as a task tracker.

Under super active development right now so host only if you can deal with occasional breaking changes.

[–] theotherbelow 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Cloud based solutions in selfhosted are a hilarious suggestion.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

I'm selfhosting it on box next to me. Wasn't so hard for me to find the GitHub link on their website.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Idk, I've heard things about HooliChat... Didn't their stream go down in the middle of a big title fight?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Plus that Gavin Belson guy keeps trying to jam his horrible signature into his products.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Considering

  • nearly a curl|sh setup
  • to run supply-chain risks
  • of supply-chain risks
  • for something without an immutable artefact and thus is its own supply-chain risk

It's already breaking ISO27002 in a few ways. I'm out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What's their revenue model? Thanks for sharing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

They have a SaaS option as well, I'm guessing that's the main revenue plan.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Anyone know of something that isn't Nextcloud Chat?

Do you absolutely need to put ONE tag on it all and say this is it?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Jitsi

,but it is a pain in the ass to selfhost with good performance.

You can take a look here as well:

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#communication---video-conferencing

One alternative that is not on the awesome selfhosted list is: https://edumeet.org/

But it is even more of a PAIN to selfhost it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

I already made a comment but you should also look at rocketchat and revolt, since they are basically FOSS discord clones

(I saw comments in the thread about wanting audio only calls.)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (9 children)

I use jami but i dont think it fits your need for guess links.

Still leave it here just in case

https://jami.net/

Jami is a free/libre, end-to-end encrypted, and private communication software.

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

If you don't mind seperated tools that do well in their own :

  • Zulip for chat
  • Jitsi for video meeting
  • And whatever calendar you want for the calendar
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I R fucking C. Who needs all the other garbage in teams?

load more comments
view more: next ›