Comment by my_throwaway23
12 hours ago
While not a commercial offering, which is what this is saying in reality - closed source, commercial alternative with (limited) interoperability, I've been running my own chat server for a while now with (limited) interoperability with both Whatsapp and Messenger.
I suspect a good number of people here don't care for any of this - FOSS, chat, voice, and video is where it's at. Interoperability for those last two don't exist yet AFAIK, and they're truly game-changers. Will that change? Does the DMA mention anything other than chat? Perhaps someone could enlighten me.
How have you been running it? How did you make it interoperable?
I'm using Element Synapse with the Mautrix bridges. They're all a pain to setup, with a ton of required configuration options each, but once setup, it's mostly transparent where any one chat originates. Reactions, emojis, media, it all just works.
The downside, of course, is that voice and video will not work.
Oh, and perhaps a ton of initial invitations, one for every conversation you have open.
There are open servers you can join, with the bridges enabled, but of course, that kind of defeats the purpose. At that point you might as well use a commercial, closed-source offering, as, ironically, a corporation with a large footprint you can sue. Average Joe with an AWS instance you might not be able to track down, should your data leak.
https://github.com/element-hq/synapse
https://github.com/mautrix/meta
Would be interesting to hear how it works what you have built.
Edit: Saw your other comment now.
Frankly I didn't "build" anything. It was mostly just a case of setting up the docker scripts, make sure the volumes have proper permissions and the configuration is sane. The configuration though, I'll take all the credit in the world for wading through, haha. These are not software with opinions included.
My Main Problem is To keep the bridges up to date. I just switched my phone number in WhatsApp and Signal and that lead to a huge ton of trouble for my bridges. After a month of fiddling with it, deleting things, updating, logging in and out of accounts and puppets, I still don't get any messages from signal into element. While it was working for years just fine it gives me the most trouble now that my dad is in the hospital in another country and I have to coordinate with my siblings a lot.