I think everybody on here is constantly keeping an eye out for what to host next. Sometimes you spinup something which chugs along nicely but sometimes you find out you’ve been missing out.

For me it’s not very refreshing or new: Paperless-ngx. Never thought I would add all my administration to it. But it’s great. I probably can’t find the thing I need, but I should have a record of every mail or letter I’ve gotten. Close second is Wanderer. But I would like to have a little bit more features like adding recorded routes to view speed and compare with previous walks. But that’s not what it is intended for.

What is that service for you?

  • Mikina@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    I’m hodsting my own Matrix server with WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord (you don’t need a bot for that, you can just share your login with the bridge) and Messenger bridge. I have all my IMs in one app, don’t have to install spyware on my phone, and I can make bots that troll annoying people that message me on any platform.

    Hosting it was super simple, thanks to the Ansible project that’s extremely robust and well done, I literally just got a hosting, domain amd changed like 5 config values to enable the bridges I wanted, gave it an IP and ssh key, and ran it. And if I need to update, I literally “just update” (it’s all wrapped up into “just” tool), and it eve handles cases where I didn’t update for a while, failing graciously and telling me what I need to do maually, usually just rename some config values.

    I wholly recommend it. You probably wont convince your friends to switch from <insert app here>, and this is the best compromise.

    I’m using a small instance on Hetzner, for 6$ a month. You could in theory get a free oracle cloud instance for it, but I didn’t manage to get one.

    And you can easily share it with anyone interrested, make them an account, so they can also consolidate their DMs. I’m sharing it with a few friends and colleagues.

    • anytimesoon@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      How do you get around the requirement to run the official app somewhere?

      I run a WhatsApp and signal bridge, but not recommend running the official app on a phone

      • Mikina@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        1 month ago

        Yeah, that part about WhatsApp is annoying. I just have a spearate profile on Graphene that has only WhatsApp installed, and whenever it wants me to refresh a session I just switch to the profile and log in.

    • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Would you recommend the Discord bridge? I’ve always wanted to install that as well. Is there anything I want to know before putting in the effort to install and configure it?

      • deadcade@lemmy.deadca.deEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago
        1. A puppeting (personal account) Discord bridge basically requires your own homeserver. You are trusting the homeserver owner / bridge host fully with your Discord account.
        2. It is technically against Discord ToS. While I don’t think anyone’s been banned yet, several people have started receiving warnings that they “spammed”, most of them after sending an attachment. These warnings are on your account for 2 years, and could contribute to an account ban.
        3. Voice chat is not, and probably will not be supported.
        4. Do NOT bridge a “large” server. You are essentially re-hosting the chats, which can be extremely taxing for large and active Discord servers.

        I use mine for a single channel in a “medium-size” server (~2k people), a friend group server, DMs, and a few channels that follow a bunch of announcement channels on other servers.

        • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
          1·
          1 month ago

          Those are certainly valid points. But do I want to care about that? Honest question… Discord also doesn’t care about my privacy. Or making the internet a better place. So I think -in turn- I feel quite alright to ignore whatever client they like me to use. And their exact ToS.

          What’s with the “taxing for large and active Discord servers”? Does it lead to issues if I’m not using their Electron app or website? I can’t imagine where this additional strain on their servers would come from?! I run my own homeserver, by the way. So I shouldn’t weigh down on anyone else’s server…

          • stalfoss@lemm.eeEnglish
            3·
            1 month ago

            When you use the official discord client, it only sends to your device whatever chat channel you have open at the time, and when you click on a different channel, it just downloads the last 20 messages, and downloads more when you scroll etc. If you bridge a discord server to a matrix server, it sends all of the contents of all of the channels in real time across. If the server had 50 channels, bridging it to matrix would be the equivalent of you having 50 official clients open, one to each channel. Hence the additional load on discord’s side to send you a lot more data than they usually would.

            (Disclaimer: this is all conjecture based on a general understanding of how the systems work, I could be getting some details wrong)

            • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
              1·
              1 month ago

              Thanks for explaining. That makes perfect sense. I was under the impression there might be something else.

              I’m not interested in forwarding spam in the first place. I don’t think I have any use of channels where messages just fly by… So I think I should be safe.

      • Mikina@programming.devEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        As far as I know the Discord bridge has some limitations, the major one being that IIRC it doesn’t atually support calls. But just for chatting across servers it has worked well for me.

        There’s also the fact that you have to either trust the project with your password (as in, the the bridfe adds a matrix bot that runs on your server, but needs your pssword), since I think it uses the web version in the background (but then you can also use it for DMs and any server), or set up a bot on the discord server you want to bridge, which obviously cant be done if you’re not an admin. It’s a foss project, but there’s always a small risk of it gping rogue.

        • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          I think I’d be fine with that. I’m using lots of Free Software projects, have Linux on my computers, wifi router, use random projects and Fediverse platforms … So far every time one of my passwords got leaked it was some breach of a proprietary platform (last.fm, Facebook, …) while the Free Software has served me extraordinary well. Usually it even limits the insatiable hunger for private data those commercial platforms have…

          • Mikina@programming.devEnglish
            2·
            1 month ago

            Yeah, that’s my experience as well. In addition to being lazy with updating, so if some kind of supply chain attack happens, I usually sorts itself out before I get to updating :D

            But I did limit my browser extensions, after I a cause with Nano Defender taught me a lesson - it was a mildly popular anit-anti-adblock killer that worked where other adblocks were detected, but the developer sold the extension to a company that turned it into a info-stealer malware and pushed an update through chrome store, which got accepted and propagated, and some of my social network sessions got compromised. So, I just stick to more popular projects where something like this shouldn’t happen, and don’t use random extensions.

    • andscape@feddit.itEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      When I was looking into matrix bridges I heard a bunch of stories about people getting their accounts blocked after using them through the bridges. Is this still an issue?

      • Mikina@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        I’ve been using it for almost a year by now, and so far I didn’t have any problems. I’ve not considered that problem though, so it might be happening and I was just lucky.

        • andscape@feddit.itEnglish
          1·
          1 month ago

          Thanks for the report. Do you use the whatsapp bridge? If so, how did you set it up? Emulator?

          • Mikina@programming.devEnglish
            1·
            29 days ago

            I use Pixel with GrapheneOS as my phone, and I just have a separate profile that only has WhatsApp installed and nothing else. Since the profiles are completely separated, it doesn’t have access to anything else I do on the phone and it’s not running in the background (the profiles are basically sandboxed fresh slates, and switching it can be set-up to behave in a same way as basically turning off the phone as far as the profile is concerned).

            When the bridge asks me to log in again or refresh a session, I simply switch to the second profile for a minute and re-log in. I’ve heard iIt might be possible to set up an emulator and leave it running on the server, but that felt like too much effort.

            • andscape@feddit.itEnglish
              1·
              27 days ago

              Understood, thanks. Seems like most people are doing it this way, keeping the app installed. Do you have to restore a backup when you re-log in? I’m always losing messages when that happens

      • cerothem@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        Once in a while discord signs me out and I have to do a bunch of extra sign-in steps on the official client. But otherwise I have discord, WhatsApp, Google voice, Google chat, Google messages (sms), Facebook, telegram, signal.

        All the mautrix bridges are will made and robust

      • Mikina@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        There is, but it requires you to log into the app every two weeks to maintain a session. You can setup a emulator to do it for you. I just have a separate profile on my Graphene with Only WhatsApp that I switch to and login whenever I get a warning.