Good morning /c/selfhosted!
I run a Jellyfin server, complete with Jellyseerr, Sonarr, Radarr, the works. This has been a fantastic learning experience, and I’ve learned so much about networking, docker-compose, and what terrible tragedies and lost work can occur when you do not RTFM.
Now that it is up and running and stable(ish), I have invited friends and family to the instance. It is securely attached to my domain, and currently I have about 12 users.
Now, I have run into an issue: I need a centralized way for them to get notifications on new content and their requests being fulfilled, and a centralized way for all of them to contact me. Right now, it’s a messy combination of sms/email/discord/phone calls.
My thought: I would love a self-hosted messaging client!
I’m wondering if anyone knows of any messaging clients that meet the following criteria:
- Grandma-level user friendliness, if possible
- One-way multi-user broadcast option
- Jellyseerr integration, or some back-assward way to get it to work with one of Jellyseerr’s integrations
- little user-to-user communication
Ultimately, my goal is the following: An app that I can use for users to submit questions and bug reports, and that I can use to broadcast news and updates, downtime notifications, and other messaging. Ideally, one that supports a “bcc” option. An additional caveat is that the users should not be able to easily find and message each other, I don’t need my conservative coworkers meeting the queer ass polycule that makes up 20% of my users.
Matrix is right there. I recommend the matrix-setup-ansible repo. If full-fledge matrix is too much, you can use revolt which runs on the same protocol but has a much simpler mode of operation.
Matrix enables you to manage permissions like on discord, so you can even have a channel for announcements and a chat room where your users can interact with you.
If you want service interaction, matrix has many wrappers in many languages enabling you to make bots as you wish, and I’m sure the things you need already exist and are already made, so you would just need to instantiate the bot too.
The only real risk is if your users try to join big rooms federated from matrix.org. your server will start syncing a huge user list and their profile picture and it’s basically toast.
I agree, I think the consensus in this thread is definitely Matrix, and I have had my eye on it for a good while anyway. I’m up for some new learning tasks. Do you know if it’s possible to restrict what users sync with my matrix instance?