this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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Reliable messenger for family use? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 day ago by anakin78z@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hello,

I've been self hosting Nextcloud for the last half a year, and my family has been using Nextcloud Talk to communicate. However, as cool it is overall, we suffer from a lot of missed messages. I've been keeping an eye on (and contributing to) the Android app, but even with all the updates, it seems like they can't quite figure out the issue with notifications not appearing consistently. My wife is fed up, so I'm looking for alternatives.

It seems like Matrix is the next logical one to try, but the Android apps have pretty poor reviews. A lot of the self hosted messengers also seem to be more like Slack replacements, rather than focused on family & friend use.

Has anyone had a good experience with a self hosted messenger for family use?

Thanks!

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[–] Bongles@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

I self hosted matrix for probably a year after me and some people started getting spam on telegram. It was the first thing I really self hosted beyond jellyfin (and plex before that) so I didn't really fully understand what was I doing and that could have affected things.

I had a few hurdles that made it not work out for me and my friends/family. First, the end to end encryption, one of the main "selling" points I feel, makes it complicated to sign in for people who don't care about any of that. You end up getting a code to save, I had to verify them at first, we'd have times where something still showed unverified, etc.

Just started hosting nextcloud recently and I'm also seeing the notification issue, but at least you just sign up and start using it.

I also noticed in matrix we never got notifications for emoji reactions (which we all use with each other). Other notifications were relatively solid though.

I never got webrtc and some stuff working and I sort of lost steam trying, so we could use element or fluffychat but not element X and we couldn't have big group calls or anything like that. That's probably on me though, but in fairness nextcloud aio just has a checkbox and all that stuff works.

Since I'm the only dork in my little group interested in this stuff I abandoned matrix when nobody used it.