this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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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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[โ€“] Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it 8 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (2 children)

@anakin78z We use xmpp (prosody on the server; a mix of conversations/cheogram/dino/snikket on our phones and laptops). We've got a family chat where the kids share the latest memes, and we message back and forth. We do also have signal (or in my case, Molly) installed, but don't use it that much. My wife just switched phones and signal was unable to transfer stuff from phone phone to the other - in general I find signal annoying to use.

We use matrix for a few years but it was buggy and dumb.

[โ€“] anakin78z@lemmy.world 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks for the info. My wife and I tried Signal a while back and didn't care for it.

I'm trying to get xmpp going today, even just as a test. ๐Ÿคž

[โ€“] lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

My wife and I tried Signal a while back and didnโ€™t care for it.

What about it didn't you like? I have no investment in Signal, my curiosity is just piqued since my wife and I use it.

[โ€“] anakin78z@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

It wasn't one specific thing. We were switching from Facebook Messenger, and found ourselves not wanting to use it all that much, often falling back to Messenger. For me, personally, I also didn't like that it didn't have a web client.

[โ€“] lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Fair enough. Signal does ship desktop clients for Windows, Mac, and even Linux; I'm actually using the Linux desktop client to chat with my wife right now.

It's something ๐Ÿคท

[โ€“] Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it 4 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

@anakin78z I still have to use Matrix for work. The clients suck (literally every single one I've tried, and I even briefly maintained Neochat for debian) and I routinely get key errors.

[โ€“] mik3dd0@lemmy.ml 3 points 14 hours ago

That's pretty cool that you use Matrix for work!