Hey guys, I recently started to play with the thought to deploy a Snikket (XMPP) server on my VPS to play around with it a bit. I already had a Matrix (Continuwuity) server running on an older VPS with Docker at one point. But besides me using some bridges (WhatsApp, Signal etc.) it didn’t see a lot of use. Originally I had set it up with the goal to replace Discord, but so far couldn’t get my small group of gamer friends to switch to something else.
What are your experiences with XMPP (doesn’t have to be Snikket) or Matrix? Would you recommend one over the other maintenance and/or usability wise?
Just curious what the community’s current sentiment is in regards to private self hosted messaging services 😊
Yeah that’s the thing with a lot of these platforms, it’s dead simple for most people to download the app and create the account. You already loose two thirds (if not more) of the people as soon as the sign up process gets a bit more complicated, even more if they have to manage and secure any kind of secret (encryption keys) themselves. Not that it would be so difficult to save this stuff in a password manager, but I guess that’s already where a lot of people still fall short… What a uphill battle that was (still is) with some of my friends and family to get them to use a password manager for a start.
There is also some that you just don’t want to put that type of responsibility onto either. I moved my grandfather to a password manager 5 or 6 years back. I reiterated at least 8 times do not forget this password if you do you will lose all passwords and need to do everything over again.
He lasted 3 or 4 weeks then suddenly called me saying he couldn’t remember his password period. Like he tried for a good 40 minutes to guess what he may have done and was in a pretty intense panic because he didn’t want to have to change every service he had.
Thankfully it had not been long enough for his file history backup to have deleted the file, so i just restored the last backup of his passwords.docx file and put it back where he was used to it. He lost those few weeks of new passwords but that was a lot better than losing every password.
I’m not about to try and have him use a password manager again, he has decent enough password management skills since he doesn’t reuse passwords period, but like, it was far too risky putting him on a password manager again.