this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2025
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I'm not sure if this is the right place but me and my friend group have lately become privacy conscious and wanted to stop using discord and other types of social media, and only log onto self hosted options that only we can access.

we've eliminated something like Revolt (now named Stoat due to it missing ideal features and the developers being anti-decentralized (as well as being extremely hostile to the userbase noticably...)

Does anyone have any idea what would be an ideal service to use?

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[–] UnhingedStopa@sopuli.xyz 18 points 2 days ago (2 children)

You could use matrix and host your own instance.

[–] Howlinghowler110th@kbin.earth 7 points 2 days ago (5 children)

we've thought about this but the documentation isn't user friendly for self hosting. we're generally worried about undesirable people finding it which would not be good.

[–] source_of_truth@lemmy.world 1 points 16 hours ago

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Disable registrations and just create your own users manually.

Continuwuity.org has reasonable documentation, and you can (and should) disable signups or require a token to sign up.

[–] artiman@piefed.social 9 points 2 days ago

you can make your instance invite only

[–] deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de 4 points 2 days ago

The documentation you were looking at might've been the Matrix specification.

There is documentation on how to host a Matrix server, I'd honestly recommend using containers (maybe docker compose) for this one. It can definitely be confusing setting up a service like a Matrix homeserver for the first time.

As for other people finding it, you can (and should) make your homeserver invite-only. It's also possible to disable federation, which makes the server self-contained. It will not accept incoming connections from other servers, nor make outgoing connections to other servers.

This does mean everyone you want to talk with has to be on your homeserver. There are probably better options available if you want to avoid Matrix' federation issues, like Spacebar.

[–] derin@lemmy.beru.co 2 points 2 days ago

There is no risk of others finding it if you don't turn on federation. It becomes a fully private instance. Just set federation to false.

[–] guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Seconding this! I have my own matrix server, it can be a bit of a pain to set up, but it works better than 99% of any other alternatives (trust me, I’ve tried almost every one of them)

[–] Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 days ago

I started trying to set it up last week, I can't seem to figure out why authentik and it will not play. It either tries authentik and gets a 404 or ignores it and doesn't find the user. (Nginx is also involved). It's the least user friendly thing I've tried to self host so far