Briar is a messaging app designed to be used by groups of people to allow for secure and censorship resistant communications.
This technically isn’t self hosted in the strictest sense but I think it is still relevant.
After a loot of research and testing different tools (Briar, Jami, Simplex, Session), I ended up using XMPP (Snikket). The call quality is good, has E2EE, Self-hosteable
Edit: fixed a typo
I don’t know why this gets downvoted. Xmpp is my solution as well. Lightweight, selfhostable and federated, it’s just a great solution. Briar is good as well and probably one of the best solutions if your are an activist/journalist. But it will eat your battery as all p2p solutions will. Is you host your own xmpp server at home, that’s really as secure as it will get imho.
Yeah… I’m a bit surprised by the downvotes also. I just shared my experience without saying anything bad about any apps. Anybody is free try any tool they want until they find the one that fits their need. Thanks for the support 🤝
Seems pretty similar to Jami except that it lacks the iOS and desktop clients that Jami already has.
Don’t use Jami. It is a security nightmare and unreliable.
Could you link me some resources for that? I may need something to demonstrate that to others.
My personal experience
Also they haven’t had a security audit
Lack of audit is not great I agree. I can see from a basic web search that security is an issue but I’m not sure ‘nightmare’ is warranted. The lack of audit seems to be main focus of concern and I’d say thats a judgement call for each person depending on threat model. I was hoping for something more conclusive than that. Its certainly adequate for a more privacy-centric way of communicating than an app that doesn’t cater for Apple users at all.
I’m never going to recommend something that I can’t get to work reliability. Also the lack of a security audit is a major deal breaker.
Communications is one of those things that needs to be absolutely solid.
This project runs on Tor. You are effectively hosting a Tor site.
Not at all. You’re effectively using a messenger that can only receive messages when your phone has an internet connection because briar doesn’t have servers. Also the connections are made through the Tor network, which hides metadata
a messenger that can only receive messages when your phone has an internet connection
To be fair, that’s true for most messengers, even ones that do have servers.
Sort of I guess
Why does it matter?
