snikket.org works well with XMPP under the hood.

Seconding the XMPP reccomendation- I run Prosody, which has been rock solid and stays up even when other services I run go down. File sharing, E2EE, reactions, voice and video calls- everything you’d expect from a modern messenger. Cheogram or Conversations are great Android clients, and Monal is the iOS client I’d reccomend.

Android notifications are notoriously difficult to get right. May I ask how is Nextcloud Talk currently implementing notifications? Is it through ntfy, a background service, or Google’s Firebase? Have you allowed background usage for both the push app and the chat app?

I use Matrix with Continuwuity and Element X, and it’s doable most of the time except for small bugs. If you disable federation, the resource usage should be minimal too. But it also requires a third party for push service which can be unreliable.

On the XMPP side, there is also Snikket which you could look into. It offers both a server (running modified Prosody) and a mobile client (modified Conversations). XMPP can run as an efficient background service on Android, so it’ll receive in-band notifications.

Regardless of options, one of the main problem I’m aware of is that Android variants tend to overkill various background app, leading to missed notifications. I think it’s better to debug on that aspect as well

Buddy is selfhostig Matrix via Element server suite community edition and using element X on android as well as the normal element app on desktop. Never missed a notification, never

Signal or Molly are probably going to be your best bets

SimpleX is pretty good if you’re looking for a signal/sms replacement rather than something slack-like

Delta chat seems pretty good, you can easily self host and it’s very lightweight.

I do not recommend matrix, the apps aren’t great, and hosting is a lot to deal with.

I am using conduit as a matrix server and fluffy chat as my main app. I think that most people could be happy with that :)

Grandma uses Signal, it looks like a normal texting app, nothing special

I’ve used XMPP for this before, using ejabberd as the server and Conversations/Monal as the client, it worked pretty well, altho ejabberd can be a bit of a handful to get running initially.

Just a fair warning: Element (Matrix client) also had issues with notifications not appearing in time, or attachments/images not loading. (This is on a self-hosted Synapse with a handful of people and 1 bridge).

I haven’t kept up much with new developments, but last I remember, hosting the official Element Server Suite Community requires Kubernetes. Third-party servers or some install scripts are an option though.

Does it have to be self-hosted? I’ve had tons of problems with Matrix. Many fewer issues with XMPP.

Chatmail is probably the easiest and best bet for reliability. Deltachat is the OG but I like Arcanechat, it’s a fork with more features.

I’d love to run matrix but is seem/what I’m reading PITA to run.

I’m considering Zulip and Mattermost.

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.

The fun one is host an OSCAR server and use AIM.

veronicaexplains.net/open-oscar-server/

Matrix works well for me.

It’s not out yet, but I’d keep an eye on Flatline. It’s by the people who make Molly (Signal client fork—it’s pretty good, been using it for years). Flatline is a Molly-compatible server implementation, i.e. so that you can host your own Signal server. Because generally if someone asked for a “reliable messenger for family use” I’d recommend Signal as a polished and reliable option, though not self-hostable unfortunately.

I use Signal because it’s the best balance of privacy and security vs. convenience and reliability I have found. Not self-hosted, but I’ve yet to find a self hosted alternative that is as reliable, especially since I don’t want to set up distributed servers, and it’s one of those things that “just needs to work” or people will abandon it quickly.

And the older people I’ve convinced to use it, like my mom, have had very little trouble adopting it. It helped that RCS messaging is so unreliable on my phone since Google or my carrier keep seeming to break it (likely became I use GrapheneOS), and also for those with iPhones it is way more compatible with itself vs Apple and Google refusing to implement RCS in a way that all features work between them, like message reactions. Without RCS, my mom couldn’t send me decent quality pictures of my niece all the time, and I couldn’t send nice pictures of my outfits to the girl I’m dating, LOL.

My family and friends all use matrix to communicate and works fine for everyone.

We use synapse (Matrix). Its stability is great but we have stable internet and backup power so…

I have never understood why there is no protocol that allows for multi-master node setup(if a message is written to one, then queue to write to the second one and ignore timestamp missmatchning and conflict resolution(It does not have to be perfect) - matrix put too much effort into this IMO).

For family i use Signal. My coworkers use IRC and I have it setup in link-mode for multi master support(but IRC does not have new features like send image, thread, reactions, emoji, text-styling, audio/video calls). Using unrealircd. Neat when the local city network is up but the fiber connection from the city network to the internet is down so I can still write to some friends, or dont care about uptime on my server since they fallback to the second, free, Oracle VM.

I’m hosting a matrix/synapse server and it’s been pretty great tbh. I use this ansible project to manage installation and updates for me and it’s been fairly painless

xmpp. don’t matrix, it causes selfhosting-phobia for normies because its ui sucks. i had a friend try matrix with me for a while and now they’re never trying another foss messenger again unless its proved to be very good.

I’ve been doing research on this and came down to two.

1. simplex
2. delta chat

simplex won because of the robust encryption and selfhosted option.

a close contender was stoneage. I liked all it took was an S3 bucket. I didn’t like that it hasn’t been updated in 3 years.

@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.