Ran from Matrix bloat to XMPP for my literate friends, Signal for the rest.
I also use BriarChat as a backup/extra channel and train as many people as I can on it.
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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Self-hosted, federated Matrix instance with wife, kids and even my old folks on it, yay! Even have video conferencing self-hosted on there. Telegram presence via mautrix-telegram bridge also there. Nheko on desktop and Element X on mobile. Fearing every Postgres update as it's an Arch server, other than that life's peachy.
Still on IRC (Libera) for shits and giggles with weechat.
Same. With a signal and WhatsApp Bridge
Signal.
More specifically the Molly fork on the phone, Signal on Desktop
What differentiates Molly from Signal?
I've really tried matrix. it's clearly the good one. Used to use telegram.
Now I'm mostly working on getting my friends over on signal. it's just barely mainstream enough.
I wish more people would move to Matrix with me, so far only my partner did. But that's good enough.
Did you self host it find a community?
No, I chose a public server with decent connection speed. I was lazy. 👻
I'm using Molly, the hardened fork of Signal that doesn't use any google services these days. GrapheneOS introduced it via their app store...called App Store.
Everyone I know except my immediate family uses Signal at least to talk to me.
did you get Molly from App Store or from Accrescent (which can be grabbed from the GrapheneOS App Store)?
Oh yeah, you're right. Store-ception
it really is. both are such minimal stores, as well.
I mostly wanted to be sure, as I understand there are 2 differing Molly packages and wasn't sure if there was maybe some way to extend the default Grapheme app store, etc.
Signal, i know its now perfect, but its easy to get normal folks over there. I'm just happy I don't have to use WhatsApp anymore.
Depends on the purpose.
Signal for private conversation.
Mastodon for my hobby.
Lemmy and Bluesky for participation in the world.
Ditto though ended up dropping Bluesky
Signal and Matrix (Fluffychat and Neochat)
Trying to get people to use signal. People don't care about ideals or principles or future problems, so it's a difficult sell.
Yeah so annoying. My actually real friends moved for me, the other ones I cut ties with.
Specifically open source?
I will use IRC until my last dying breath, both libera.chat for public chats and one on a tildes server for a smaller community of computer weirdos (weird in the best way possible).
I use matrix for things like Ubuntu Studio community chat which have given up on IRC because it's "not popular" or whatever ;) I used to strongly dislike matrix, but now that I've put the recovery key in my password manager, I only mildly dislike it.
For non-open source, I'm still on Google messages (gross) for RCS/MMS/SMS, Signal for cool people and my therapist (I guess shes cool too---the only person I've successfully brought to signal), Bluebubbles for my family who all have iDevices, Discord for work social chat, Slack for the one makerspace who uses it, and email...
Things I've successfully distanced from after using a lot:
- WhatsApp. This is a challenge because a lot of cool group chats in my IRL community are here.
- FB messenger. I still have friends on Facebook. Or I should say, people I've lost touch with are still on Facebook.
- IG: I log into this account once every 6mo or so to contact people that I only have on here.
Your Homescreen must be full of apps . I didn't know you could use irc for chatting but it makes sense... I'll try it out
This is a real question and I don't mean to be rude, but... what did you think irc was for?
Well I get my tram updates from an IRC channel. Never thought about it being used to send something back for whatever reason
Very cool! It used to be the only option for text chat, and is still the backend for a lot of more modern chat stuff in games etc. There was DCC for sending files, phish for applying encryption, bouncers so you wouldn't miss messages while offline, all kinds of stuff. Really useful protocol
Try ##chat on libera :)
I've used matrix for years but now moved to Xmpp and simplex
Xmpp only works on highspeed mobile data... Or is that my clients fault?
I've not encountered that issue. For reference I'm using prosody self-hosted and monocles on android (dino on Linux)
i like snikket! i want to move to prosody soon but haven't had the time to figure it all out.
Email, usually thunderbird or k9 these days. For online chat I have a small nextcloud server but I rarely use it for that.
You might like to check out DeltaChat.
One group of friends went to signal. One group of friends stays in SMS.
I don't really have the ability to dictate the messaging service app to others.
Monocles chat for the xmpp network. I managed my family to finally leave WhatsApp behind with it. It even has support for mini apps inside. Everything is completely open source.