Hi all,
I run a private self-hosted Synapse server with bridges for:
- Signal
- Doscord
- IRC
- Google Voice
- Custom APIs
I am thinking of switching to XMPP. Can anyone recommend a good Docker-based server and transport combo that I could test out?
The Signal gateway has currently issues, due to Signald being broken.
For WhatsApp and Discord there is Slidge.
IRC works great with Biboumi.
I am not aware of a Google voice bridge, but there are ways to bridge to the regular phone network and sms. The easiest is the https://jmp.chat/ service.
perhaps a stupid question, but are there bridges for XMPP ? My impression is that XMPP is as good as empty (I do use it mainly as a federated service). Is there still a lot of active development on the XMPP side of things?
I do not understand your point with ‘you cannot change the URL’. If you use matrix as non-federated and just the only user, what is the problem that you need to change the URL when you need to set up a new server on a new URL? Not being able to change the server at the same URL seems like a logical concequence of authentication, be it for server-to-server communication as for client-to-server communication.
Yes they are called “transports”.
As for when I tried to change the URL, I was moving all services from publicly resolvable DNS to
.lan
, and Matrix is an issue because you can’t change that after the fact, even if you haven’t federated.Yes there are gatewaxy for xmpp. See for example https://slidge.im/ but there are also a few other projects.
It’s maybe a bit less than for Matrix, but the ones that exist tend to work better.
Prosody is probably your best bet. It’s modular, easily configurable and is basically fully compliant with the XMPP specification. For your bridges however, I’d reccomend not going fully into XMPP because there are very little bridges available for it. As for dockerization, apparently they are not currently updating their dockerfiles, so this is another thing to take into account.
The Prosody docker images are basically https://snikket.org/ which is developed by one of the Prosody developers.
But Ejabberd also has good Docker containers.
Unfortunately the whole point of my system is bridges/transports. I don’t even use Matrix itself, I use it as a centralized messenger.
Or Slidge
Promising, would need to supplement GV and Signal, but this gets me halfway there, thanks.
Maybe try Matterbridge
Doesn’t matter bridge work by “adding a user” to rooms, vs just your user?
I haven’t actually used it, so I wouldn’t know
It’s distributed through standard package managers, it would be trivial to create a Dockerfile to make your own container.
snikket is prosody’s little sister. docker ready
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I’ve been considering setting up matrix or xmpp, can I ask what is motivating you to switch?
Overall I’ve been happy with Matrix (private not federated), but it’s very convoluted. Whenever anything goes wrong it’s really difficult to figure out why, as there is a lot of complexity. And once you set something up, it’s really hard if not impossible to make a change.
For instance, since it’s built for federation, changing the URL is impossible.
So I’d like to try out XMPP since it’s much more lightweight and simple. I may not switch, but want to explore.
I’m looking at tuwunel to setup instead of synapse as soon as it’s ready. Still matrix, but maybe better for small instances.
Tuwunel had intentions to build a Synapse migration tool, but I haven’t heard anything about it since. Was waiting for it so I could bring over profiles and most importantly chat history for myself and my family.