Use Signal. It's pretty secure and private and the best thing about it is that it's also FOSS!
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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Yea, I use Signal with my in real life friends, I just wanted a website alternative to use with friends i make online
(nvm, found ZulipChat)
Have normal friends? Signal. It just works. Have difficult/paranoid friends? See the other commenter's imgur idea.
You can use OnionShare to host a chat instance on the Web over Tor.
Encrypt what you want to say and use whatever means of transport you want.
You and your friend should..
- create and exchange a set of Age public keys
- use them to encrypt a simple text file
- bzip the encrypted file
- convert the binary archive to base64
- embed the base64 using Pixelknot into a photo downloaded from unsplash that contains a distinct object you both agreed on (eg a windmill)
- upload the file to imgur
Now you both can privately chat with each other by monitoring imgur's latest uploads, downloading every image that contains a windmill, read the base64 string, convert it to its binary bzip form, unpack the encrypted file and decrypt it.
Self hosted rocketchat or Jitsi?
This question is so generic with added weird statements, there are literally dozens of solutions with little research. Due to this I assume you haven't formulated all your requirements and want us to get them out of you.
There ain't really much requirements to make a big post listing them. I just want a place to chat with my friends.
Well then, literally almost ANY chat daemon you can install in any Linux will just do. And there are loads!
If you want to pay a provider to do that or rent a cheap Vs and do it yourself is another thing.
So if some guidance is all you need that's fine and something I'll gladly provide. Rocketchat - as someone else already posted - is relatively recent but also quite modern due to this, running in browser, app or mobile (but quite the overkill für a handful of people).
Any really old IRC based daemon would not require any resources by today's standards and still run perfectly for your case. But it's very old standards might not fit your expectations.
Jabber with encryption is good.
This is the only one I can think of ATM that runs in the browser: https://github.com/positive-intentions/chat
Distribute a codex to your friends by hand, then use it to talk on any platform
IRC with tor or i2p should fit the bill. On mobile you can use orbot to have the tor service running in the background and then configure your IRC client to use the correct port (5050? Can't quite remember).