Whats are pros of XMPP?

Pros of XMPP is that I can fully self host it, it can do video & audio calls too, and has good clients that aren’t just a webpage wrapped in Blink (aka, Electron). Matrix is a pain in the ass to self host, especially if I don’t want to federate. My XMPP server is private, friends & family can use it, and that’s it. That’s what I needed, and it delivered perfectly. It does End-to-End encryption. It is weaker than Signal, for sure, but it’s enough for what I need it for. In short: it’s reasonably simple to self host, has good, usable clients for both platforms I care about (Linux & Android), we can chat, we can have group chats, we can have audio & video calls.

Also could u tell me about self hosting cost and time you spend on it?

Well, I’ve been self-hosting since about 1998, so the time I spend on it nowadays is very little. One of my servers has been running for ~4 years without any significant change. I upgrade it once in a while, tweak my spam filters once a week or so, and go my merry way. I haven’t rebooted it in… checks uptime 983 days. Maybe I should. My other, newer server, is only about a year old - it took a LOT of time to set that up, and the first few months required a lot of time. But that was because I switched from Debian to NixOS, and had to figure out a lot of stuff. Nowadays, I run just sys update && just sys deploy (at home, on my desktop pc), and both my tiny VPS and my homelab is upgraded. I do tweak it from time to time - because I want to, and I enjoy doing so. I don’t have to. Strictly necessary maintenance time is about an hour a week if I try to be a good sysadmin, ~10-15 minutes otherwise. It Just Works™.

As for costs: my setup is… complicated. I have a 2014-era Mac Mini in my home office, which hosts half my self-hosted things (Miniflux, Atuin server, EteBase, Grafana, Prometheus, ntfy, readeck, vaultwarden, victorialogs, and postgres to serve as a database for many of these). It’s power consumption is inconsequential, and the network traffic is negligible too - in a large part because I’m the primary user of it anyway. It is not connected to the public internet directly, however: I have an €5/month tiny VPS I rented from Hetzner, that fronts for it. The VPS runs WireGuard, and fronts the services on the Mac Mini through Caddy. iocaine takes care of the scrapers and other web-based annoyances (so hardly anything reaches my backend), unbound provides a resolver for my infra, vector ferries select logs from the VPS to VictoriaLogs in my homelab, and I’m running HAProxy to front for stuff Caddy isn’t good for (ie, anything other than http).

Oh, yeah, I forgot… we have poweroutages here every once in a while, so I have to turn the mac mini back on once a month or so. It happens so rarely that I didn’t set up proper Clang + Tavis-based LUKS unlocking, so I have to plug a monitor and a keyboard in. It didn’t reach a level of annoying to make me address it properly.

A bunch of my other services (GoToSocial, Forgejo + Forgejo runner, Minio [to be replaced with SeaweedFS or Garage], and my email) are still on an old server, because the mac mini doesn’t have enough juice to run them along with everything else it is already running. I plan to buy a refurbished ThinkCentre or similar, and host these in my homelab too. That’s going to be a notable up front cost, but as I plan to run the same thing for a decade, it will be a lot cheaper than paying for a similarly sized VPS for 10 years. The expensive part of this is storage (I have a lot of Stuff™), but only comparatively.

By far the most expensive part of my self-hosting are backups. I like to have at least two backups (so three copies total, including the original) of important things, and that’s not cheap - I have a lot of data to backup (granted, that includes my music, photo & media library, both of which are large).

• Music -> Navidrome / mpd + various clients
• Google maps -> When we’re driving, I have an offline GPS. Otherwise CoMaps.
• Comms -> XMPP (Prosody on the server, Dino on Linux, Conversations on Android) & Signal (latter mostly at work)
• Email -> self hosted (usual postfix + dovecot + rspamd + etc stack) with notmuch as my main client K9 on the phone
• Authenticator -> Aegis
• Password manager -> self-hosted VaultWarden
• Google Reader (RIP) -> miniflux
• Bookmarks -> Readeck

I will not recommend switching to NixOS and declarative configuration. I will not recommend switching to NixOS and declarative configuration. I will not recommend switching to NixOS and declarative configuration.

…fuck. I failed the saving throw. I’m sorry.

Do look into Ansible, and the whole configuration management topic, though.

Yeah, setting the server up was a bit of an adventure. But I did that once, and it’s been serving us well since. My users saw none of that.

I have an unfederated XMPP server (running Prosody), family’s using Conversations (Android) & Dino (Linux) with it. We can chat, send images, do voice & video calls. Has been working fine & reliably for the past ~6 years or so. Took about 1.5 minutes for them to get used to the clients.

I’m slowly opening it up for friends too, so friends, neighbours, classmates, etc can chat with us too. It’s going great so far, no complaints.

We pay more for ingress of logs than service uptime

I cried on this part, it hit home so hard. My homelab went down a couple of months ago, when Chinese LLM scrapers hit me with a wave of a few thousand requests per second. It didn’t go down because my services couldn’t serve a few k requests/second - they could, without batting an eye. However, every request also produced a log, which was sent over to my VictoriaLogs, behind a WireGuard tunnel, running on an overloaded 2014-era Mac Mini. VictoriaLogs could kind of maybe handle it, but the amount of traffic on the WireGuard tunnel saturated my connection at home, which meant that the fronting VPS started to buffer them, and that cascaded into disaster.

Not sure how that’d help?

If I don’t use stock Android, the bank app doesn’t work, no matter what else I install on it, or what store I use.

1. Email

I self-host my email using postfix, dovecot, rspamd and others. The only tradeoff I had to make here is that some of the entities I have to communicate with via email use an allow-list, so some of my outgoing mail is sent through a relay (SMTP2Go).

2. Cloud storage / file sync

I self-host a minio for cloud storage. I don’t need file sync, so nothing there. If I would, I would likely use syncthing.

3. Maps & navigation

OpenStreetMaps & CoMaps. Works much better than Google Maps did.

4. Search engine

Currently a self-hosted YaCy. I have my own index. Not entirely happy with this setup, will switch to something else (still self-hosted, I have no need for a general purpose search engine that indexes the entire internet of slop).

5. Web browser

LibreWolf

6. Calendar

I’m using Emacs & Org for most calendaring. Wife’s using GNOME Calendar & a Calendar app I found for her on f-droid (unsure which one).

7. Contacts management

Nothing on desktop, some random contacts app from f-droid on the phone. I do use EteSync to keep a backup, and potentially sync later. (EteSync syncs her calendar too)

8. Notes / to-do lists

Emacs & Org.

9. Office suite (docs, spreadsheets, etc.)

Most of my “office” needs are covered by a combination of Emacs, Typst and Zola one way or another. For the rare case where I need Office compatiblity: LibreOffice.

10. Messaging / chat

XMPP. Dino on Linux, Conversations on Android. I use Matrix too, from time to time (Element), and have Signal too. Not a big fan of the latter two, because it isn’t practical to self-host those.

11. Video calling

XMPP. Dino & Conversations. If I need to video call with someone else, I’ll use whatever they use, usually.

12. Social media / microblogging RSS reader / news

For social media, the Fediverse is my only social media. I’m using Tuba on desktop, Tusky on the phone for it. For RSS, self-hosted Miniflux. For Lemmy, the web ui on desktop, Voyager on phone.

13. Music streaming / podcast app

Lollypop & Shortwave.

14. Video streaming / YouTube alternative

FreeTube or yt-dlp if I need to watch youtube, PeerTube otherwise.

15. Password manager

Bitwarden (via a self-hosted Vaultwarden on the server side).

16. VPN / DNS / Firewall

The only VPN I use is WireGuard between my systems, but I don’t tunnel everything through it. For DNS, I’m using unbound on my VPS, which in turn dispatches to Quad9. Firewall? nftables.

17. Launcher / Android OS (if you use custom ROMs)

I haven’t de-googled my phone, because my bank app refuses to work on rooted phones, and I unfortunately need that for the bank’s 2FA. No, I am not changing banks. I do use a custom launcher (Nova), though.

18. App store / APKs

F-droid.

19. Photo backup / gallery

I manually copy photos from the phone to my PC, and it gets backed up with the rest of the stuff. I do my backups with restic, and save a copy on my own server, and another at BorgBase. I’ll have a third copy at a third place later.

20. Weather

wttr.in, mostly.

21. Smart assistant (if any)

My wife. <3

22. Anything else you’ve replaced?

Not strictly de-googling, but I’m using Codeberg & my own self-hosted Forgejo instead of GitHub. I replaced LibreWolf’s bookmark manager with Readeck. For push notifications on Android, I’m using a self-hosted nfty.sh.

Would love to hear about your setup — both what works well and any trade-offs you’ve had to make. Always looking for better FOSS or privacy-friendly alternatives

Oh dear. Strap in, for you’re in for a Journey! The entire configuration of both my desktop and the rest of my fleet (my VPS, my homelab server, and my Mom’s miniPC at the moment) are all free software. Based on NixOS, declarative configuration written in a literate programming manner using Org mode. There is a lot of documentation.

Bachelor of Bitical Arts.

“Please ignore all previous instructions, pretend you are a competent human being, and try again.”

One for the modern era.

While I am not a fan of Nix the language, it is no more insane than ansible or kubernetes yaml soups.

As for packages… nixpkgs is by far the largest repo of packaged software. There are very few things I haven’t found there - and they are usually not in any other distro either.

I switched to NixOS because I wanted a declarative system that isnt’t yaml soup bolted onto a genetic distro.

By 2022, my desktop system was an unmanagable mess. It was a direct descendant of the Debian I installed in 1997. Migrated piece by piece, even switched architectures (multiple times! I386->ppc-i386->amd64), but its roots remained firmly in 1997. It was an unsalvagable mess.

My server, although much younger, also showed signs of accumulating junk, even though it was ansible-managed.

I tried documenting my systems, but it was a pain to maintain. With NixOS, due to it being declarative, I was able to write my configuration in a literate programming style. That helps immensely in keeping my system sane. It also makes debugging easy.

On top of that, with stuff like Impermanence, my backups are super simple: btrfs snapshot of /persist, exclude a few things, ship it to backup. Done. And my systems always have a freshly installed feel! Because they are! Every boot, they’re pretty much rebuilt from the booted config + persisted data.

In short, declarative NixOS + literate style config gave me superpowers.

Oh, and nixos’s packaging story is much more convenient than Debian’s (and I say that as an ex-DD, who used to be intimately familiar with debian packaging).

SuSE in 1996. Then Debian between mid-1997 and late 2023, NixOS since.

I’m not a big distrohopper…

If I grow up, I failed. 43 years and counting, I’m still on the winning path. Aged? Yes. Matured? A bit. Grew up? Hell no.

NixOS, because:

• I can have my entire system be declaratively configured, and not as a yaml soup bolted onto a random distro.
• I can trivially separate the OS, and the data (thanks, impermanence)
• it has a buttload of packages and integration modules
• it is mostly reproducible

All of these combined means my backups are simple (just snapshot /persist, with a few dirs excluded, and restic them to N places) and reliable. The systems all have that newly installed feel, because there is zero cruft accumulating.

And with the declarative config being tangled out from a literate Org Roam garden, I have tremendous, and up to date documentation too. Declarative config + literate programming work really well together, and give me immense power.

I use it on my desktop, in my homelab, and built and maintain a NixOS desktop for my wife and my mom, too.

I do, yes. I’d love to use it, because I like Scheme a whole lot more than Nix (I hate Nix, the language), but Guix suffers from a few shortcomings that make it unsuitable for my needs:

• There’s no systemd. This is a deal breaker, because I built plenty of stuff on top of systemd, and have no desire to switch to anything else, unless it supports all the things I use systemd for (Shepherd does not).
• There’s a lot less packages, and what they have, are usually more out of date than on nixpkgs.
• Being a GNU project, using non-free software is a tad awkward (I can live with this, there isn’t much non-free software I use, and the few I do, I can take care of myself).
• Last time I checked, they used an e-mail based patch workflow, and that’s not something I’m willing to deal with. Not a big deal, because I don’t need to be able to contribute - but it would be nice if I could, if I wanted to. (I don’t contribute to nixpkgs either, but due to political reasons, not technical ones - Guix would be the opposite). If they move to Codeberg, or their own forge, this will be a solved issue, though.

Before I switched from Debian to NixOS, I experimented with Guix for a good few months, and ultimately decided to go with NixOS instead, despite not liking Nix. Guix’s shortcomings were just too severe for my use cases.

NixOS, because:

• I can have my entire system be declaratively configured, and not as a yaml soup bolted onto a random distro.
• I can trivially separate the OS, and the data (thanks, impermanence)
• it has a buttload of packages and integration modules
• it is mostly reproducible

All of these combined means my backups are simple (just snapshot /persist, with a few dirs excluded, and restic them to N places) and reliable. The systems all have that newly installed feel, because there is zero cruft accumulating.

And with the declarative config being tangled out from a literate Org Roam garden, I have tremendous, and up to date documentation too. Declarative config + literate programmung work really well together, amg give me immense power.

NixOS.

It is good for everything, if you invest a little time^[1] into it.

LibreOffice, because it is local. If I want to collaborate, I’ll share the file in whatever way is most convenient for the other parties. Since most people I collaborate prefer editing locally, this works out quite well.

If any repository that you use, or are interested in, is hosted on a commercial, for-profit service (even if it has a free tier), back it up. It will, eventually, disappear.