I use NextCloud for informal shares as its GUI is very similar Microsoft or Google’s -Drive and is easily adoptable. I also host a private pastebin instance for code or guides I think may be helpful, and Matrix for personal stuff. But I do like how Bitwarden/Vaultwarden’s share works – it feels more secure, like WeTransfer. It still has its applications. And Vaultwarden file share is free, size limit is adjustable in server config, and is not limited to what the Bitwarden clients say!

It was a huge pain and I ended up troubleshooting with Gemini for hours aha! I know, I’ll plant a tree to offset my sins. It was at least useful to rapid search solutions and tell me what component was the most likely issue.

I had coturn set up for legacy Element Classic and, before that, XMPP, but as I wasn’t using those I decided to shut it down and try using Matrix Livekit’s internal TURN server. I’m not sure what actually helped in the end, but Livekit’s latest build caused a bug, so I instead pulled v1.9.12. I also shuffled around my reverse proxy config (from my old attempts) because some endpoints seemed to have changed. I’ll update later with anonymised config :3

Hey, just coming back to see how your setup’s going, and to say I’ve finally managed to get Element Call working for Matrix – I can help you get it running if you like!

I set up a simple sync service with FolderSync (similar to Syncthing) on Android for my family, that preserves their mobile files on a server hosted SMB share. Haven’t even looked at storage encryption though. You can’t underestimate a simple yet effective solution, sometimes so simple it flies under the radar.

They put a couple things behind the paywall of US$19.80/y: the ability to securely share files instead of just text, and to host TOTP authentication. As it is I prefer using other services for sharing, and while TOTP auth is nice I’m happy with Aegis.

Edited to fix Bitwarden’s price obscurity

This touches on one of the reasons I am inclined to pirate – the majority of the time it’s not the author or developer that you pay, it’s the distributor or streaming provider (who often takes a 30% cut), then the payment processor takes about 5%, then the publisher takes a significant and usually undisclosed portion, until finally (and this differs between media) the actual creator sees perhaps £10 of a £60 purchase. Until the vultures clear the field and stop taking hefty cuts, or if I trust the publisher, I am inclined to find a way to actually pay the developer, or not at all, because even though it takes effort to research the sources and distributors, I would much rather vote with my wallet and not accept astronomical distributor fees and anti-consumer practices.

When I was younger I found an album I really liked on Bandcamp. The monetisation model the artist used meant you could actually pay 0 for the music. As I was tight financially I took it but was extremely grateful. This can be seen as consensual piracy, because in my eyes that produce is worth a certain value that can be exchanged with money, even if the seller doesn’t say it. Anyway, Bandcamp takes a 15% cut which is low for the industry, and this particular artist was also independent, meaning they were their own publisher/record label, so when I could I honoured that ‘pay what you feel it’s worth’ approach and bought it a couple years or so later for more than a commercial album. Trust is also extremely infrequent in capitalism, and I appreciated the design.

I like that. The machine I use to host ytdl-sub is called ourtube

Mad props to the dev for a GUI

It is indeed rather complex.

I think you got a downvote for promoting mailcow, users can be fickle

This is good, I use Mailcow Dockerized and it uses 10% of one 3.7GHz core, but 2GB of RAM. Stalwart definitely seems better for low memory hosts. Seems to have one instance of rspamd for each mailbox, they and ofelia are the biggest users of RAM according to top

Study results

Article

Can confirm what another user said, that Intel iGPU would be better in your case.

I’ll let you know now – if it runs Windows kill it. My server was originally Windows running Docker Desktop. It hosted three services: Minecraft server which lagged like a bitch; Samba folder share; and Emby. Whenever Emby playback froze I knew Windows, whose antivirus kept running the HDD under constant load, had fucked the i6 6100 to 100%, which happened at least twice a day.

Moving on, now I run Proxmox. I host 25 services with the CPU at ~35% idle and 24GB RAM at 75%. Nothing lags.

Before I plugged in the GPU my server drew 25W consistently, going to 35W under load. With the GPU, an RTX 3060 11GB (used), it uses 85W idle, so make sure it’s worth it. For my case it not only transcodes for Emby and resumes streaming in a second, but also handles voice inference for Home Assistant in under a second, and mid-sized Ollama LLM responses. Would recommend a high VRAM Nvidia card (for CUDA) in that scenario, as my model Gemma3 7B uses 6GB VRAM and 2GB RAM. But a top model, say Dolphin-Mixtral 22B, needs 80GB storage, 17GB RAM and… Well I don’t have the RAM but you get it. LLMs are intensive.

Forget Liberation, original AC Mobile is the real shit (link)

Cloudflare only just started redirecting to the Archive if a site they protect goes offline. Which I feel is a 200IQ feature.

Here you are :) it’s a Github link (I’m looking into hosting a private pastebin like PrivateBin and will replace this later)

My install must have been broken then 😭 and my experience is from around early 2025, and I didn’t keep it around, so my intel is also dated…

Ooh they upgraded? Yeah my information is based on early 2025 when I tried it aha

Oh, and if you wish, it’s a bit old now but no doubt useful, I have written installation guides on both Prosody and Continuwuity, based on Proxmox containers.

As someone who’s tried both, it depends on what you want. Your choice of Matrix server depend on any political and ethical values – some say Synapse is too corporate, being maintained by Element who are for-profit and obtain funding from corps and governments, so some prefer others such as Conduit ( – until maintaining slowed to near abandonment and it was superseded by Conduwuit – until the owner got cyberbullied so hard she quit the project and it was superseded by Continuwuity) because it was built on Rust and much more efficient than Synapse, or Dendrite. I recommend Continuwuity.

Then there’s clients – the only mature matrix client for mobiles is Element, and there are two apps, Classic and X, who offer different pros and cons, and imo are not good enough on their own, both are in a kind of beta stasis. But it’s the best they have. If you really don’t need calling, then Element X, FluffyChat or Schildichat is your app and Element Web for desktop access (available on Github). However, when exchanging encryption keys to trust another of your devices, or a contact’s device, only Element offers simple QR scanning.

In short, Matrix is very good as a privacy-focused server with partially working, modern looking clients.

Then there is XMPP. Again there are different backends to choose from and I am inclined to recommend Prosody. XMPP just works out of the box for me, calling included, and is relatively stable. However, there are large caveats – several pieces of user data are stored unencrypted on the server, which is fine for you as the owner, but it’s a lot harder for someone else using your service to trust that. And, while XMPP uses OMEMO encryption keys, handshaking with devices is far more manual than Matrix’s Olm/Megolm and involves a multi-step process, and migrating to a new device is a pain because messages are not backwards decrypted, so they must be transferred from the first device. Finally, clients are very rough. The best desktop clients such as Gajim and Pidgin still look like they were built in 2001, and while mobiles have Monocles, Cheogram and Conversations, they all look very similar, as the former are very slight modifications of Conversations.

In short, XMPP may lack some comforts of modern messengers, but it is simpler to set up than Matrix, and offers many of the same features. However, the manual key sharing process might scare off all but the most avid privacy enthusiasts, especially that if you migrate to a new device without sharing message history from a previous verified device, messages are lost.

Choose Matrix for polished software, inviting many contacts, and, with Element X featuring (eventually) Element Call, complete E2EE.

Choose ol’ faithful XMPP for an easier initial setup, if video calls are important, you appreciate that historical messages cannot, by design, be hacked into, or if you don’t like Element the company.

I too have heard good things about SimpleX and Signal, and recommend trying them if they are valid contenders for your use case. Signal really is the best (most private, least data-farming) non-selfhosted option.

Well yes, the more CSAM detection and predator hunting, the better. Task forces and, dare I say it, detection programs with algorithms that may or may not include AI learning, are invaluable to eliminating the actually terrible stuff, anything that can’t even be educational.

I believe the Online Safety Act and Chat Control’s sections that tie every user’s real identity to their online actions is not a solution, because when that data gets leaked and/or abused many innocent lives are in danger. I trust the state very little. I trust unidentified malicious hackers even less.