this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
33 points (94.6% liked)

Selfhosted

56831 readers
416 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

  7. No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Just to start off, know that I have zero experience with this. I'm only looking into doing this because I'm absolutely sick and tired of centralised services (in this case Discord) turning to shit, and want to start a Discord-like/alternative federation between my friends.

Prosody seems to be the easiest to set up, and has all the available capabilities for a server that allows Discord-like functionality (text, group voicecall, streaming). Movim is the client that makes use of all that.

But I don't have a clue how to set up a Prosody server with Podman. I've never done this before. I started by downloading the Prosody image through Podman, then tried running it, which prompted the creation of a container. Kept everything at the defaults and tried running it, but it didn't work.

What do I do from here?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] stratself 1 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

You can try Snikket.org, which is basically Prosody but easier. But you can't selfhost "on each person's own computers" as you said because you'd still need a publicly exposable IP addresses and high uptime. Maybe you could try registering on an XMPP or Matrix instance you like and migrate your community over there first


Question for others: is Prosody's (and XMPP's) group calls really good? I'm under the impression that Matrix (with Element Call) is currently better due to the SFU architecture, but I'd be happy to be proven otherwise. I'm interested to hear required specs, how large the calls can be, and how much strain it puts on the TURN server and clients especially when it comes to multiparty streaming

AFAIK the Movim people are working on SFU calls too, but not soon

[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 1 points 19 hours ago

Maybe. Looking like the best option right now.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 22 hours ago

Yes, Matrix is a bit ahead with SFU calls (after depending on Jitsi Meet for a long time, which uses xmpp under the hood). But for most usecases it doesn't matter so much. On a modern internet connection a SFU basically only starts being useful in calls with ten or more participants. For corporate board meeting calls maybe, but your family call is also fine without.