All your chats in one app - Self-host Matrix with Bridges and Cloudflare

Do your chats look like this? Do you always forget which contacts use which apps? Do you wish there was a way to have all your chats in just one place?

In the following guide I’m going to show you how to use Matrix to achieve your dream of an all-in-one chat app, by using Matrix bridges and securing the connection with Cloudflare Tunnels.

WetBeardHairs,

“Oops I sent that goatse meme to my boss, not my friend” is not a fuckup I want to have. Segregation of apps is sometimes a virtue.

thisisawayoflife,

Don’t cross streams.

Zerodya,

You can keep your work apps separate from this. At least that’s what I would do

blkpws,

Fucked up until your boss replies you with another meme.

arcrust,

I use ferdium.

It’s combines every app/website I want to be connected to. Snapchat Lemmy Element Gmail Google tasks Discord Google messages Mastadon Steam chat FB messenger Proton mail Microsoft teams Telegram Slack Github Icloud

You can even add custom services, although I haven’t tried to do it. The only one missing is signal.

It is desktop only though

Shrek,

Sounds a lot like Beeper… beeper apps for Android and iPhone in addition to desktop though.

Lojcs,

That looks more like a web browser than anything else. Does it have any advantages over opening the pages in a browser?

arcrust,

It basically is. AFAIK, there’s no browser based way for steam chat, Google messages, or snapchat. I’m sure there are others too.

The biggest advantage I can think of is notification integration. The ‘tabs’ do give notification counts. You can minimize to the system tray so it doesn’t have to be open. It would be seperate from your web browser, so if you have 30 tabs open like I do it’ll be less cluttered. But it’ll send notifications to the desktop with snippets of the message, like a popup on your phone. Also, even if you clear all your cookies/browser history etc., since it’s seperate from the browser, you don’t have to worry about logging in again.

kev,

It will be great if you make a video , me as a beginner would like to follow it but thank you so much for the guide!

skankhunt42,
@skankhunt42@lemmy.ca avatar

I’ve been doing this for years. I also bridge my SMS/MMS messages. I’d LOVE to bridge calls somehow too

johntash,

Do you bridge your sms from your actual phone number or did you have to set up a new VoIP number or something like that?

skankhunt42,
@skankhunt42@lemmy.ca avatar

I’ve tried these but I need MMSes and can’t figure out the alpha one with MMS.

I have a pinephone and found an okay one here. wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_MMS_with_Matrix#Se…

It doesn’t work very well but I can ssh into the pinephone and restart it or mess with the modem as needed. You run a matrix server and its a python script on the phone that bridges messages to it. I hate using my phone so its super easy to put up with. I do wish it was written better… I’ve been considering either contributing to the project or making my own because it doesn’t seem very active.

Edit, sorry, so, I forward my calls to a VoIP number and I bridge SMS/MMS using the pinephone to a selfhosted matrix server. Id love to bridge m’y calls to matrix too but I can’t find anything that does that.

johntash,

Thanks for that. I didn’t realize those bridges even existed! Did you try mautrix-gmessages at all? It looks like it supports mms and rcs and is actively developed.

I need to set up a new matrix server but I’ll probably give those a try too.

Having a pine phone would be pretty cool to have things like that to mess with.

skankhunt42,
@skankhunt42@lemmy.ca avatar

No, i’ve never tried that one.

I do my best to stay far, far away from google. I have a used pixel 3 from ebay with GrapheneOS. No google play services or anything. I pay a company to host my mail (doing it myself wasn’t worth it). I don’t like to be the product and using the #1 advertising company services for free? Hard pass.

beeng,

Can somebody tell me if I need to open SSH port 22 to internet on my local? Id rather not…that mean I cannot use this?

Zerodya,

Only locally, so that your local computer can access your server locally. Then the Cloudflare proxy will allow you to connect to it from the internet securely through a two-factor authentication or any other access type you choose, without opening any port to the internet. It’s all explained in this section.

You can also implement passwordless authentication but that would probably be too extra.

beeng,

Roger. Thanks, I’m pretty handy with ops, but I have no domain… Could a dynamic dns suffice?

Zerodya,

I guess not. I’m not that experienced with ddns but I think there’s no way to have subdomains?

Skies5394,

Beeper is great but you have no idea what they’re doing with your data.

This is work, and I still think there’s a niche between the two, with an assembled docker rather than ansible playbook, that is going to be the one that takes off.

Zerodya, (edited )

Beeper is great but you have no idea what they’re doing with your data.

Thought the same, that’s why I decided to learn how to host it locally and wanted to share the knowledge.

an assembled docker rather than ansible playbook, that is going to be the one that takes off.

Definitely. Right now it causes quite a few headaches and Docker is also what’s probably most known by selfhosters.

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