stown

Nobody told me this, it was just lack of information on my part. Matrix makes a big deal about end2end encryption but Prosody and Openfire don't seem to put that point out front.

I'm done with Matrix for now and I want to see if XMPP will work for me.

This isn't meant to be used in case of emergency (not mission critical). I just want something to replace Google Hangouts, primary for my wife and myself.

That being said, I feel comfortable with the security and stability of my backend and I'm already hosting publicly accessible projects for myself and others. I don't need you to try to talk me out of it.

Being that this community is for self-hosting I prefer to keep all of my services self-hosted. I have seen that list from a Google search already but thank you anyway.

Thank you! I appreciate the tip. Install instructions already look much clearer.

Since you aren't behind CGNAT you can go full self-hosted! Don't bother with Tailscale or Cloudflare Tunnel or other VPN services that connect through third parties if you can help it.

Here's something to get you started with setting up a wireguard server on your NUC. https://github.com/Nyr/wireguard-install

I don't know enough about ActivityPub to say for sure but I believe that in order to federate properly (grab posts and comments from other servers as well as sending posts and comments to other servers) you need to have a publicly accessible domain with SSL. Hosting on localhost ( the computer you want to access from) is pointless if you don't have a reverse proxy set up to actually let others see your server online.

If the ISP allows port forwarding for wireless connections (as you said in your post) you just get yourself a WiFi router that can work in bridge mode.

Then you forward your ports (in the ISP router) to your bridge router and then you log into your bridge router and forward ports to your wired devices.

This assumes that the WiFi connection on the bridge router acts as WAN and performs NAT for its wired devices. If the bridge router is really just a bridge then you should only have to forward ports on the ISP router.

Check this out: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Makes setting up a Matrix server super simple. However, I'm not totally sold on Matrix. It has been pretty unreliable for me with messages not triggering alerts in the app, messages just not being delivered or delayed by multiple hours.

I wish it was as reliable as Google chat....

I'm starting to wonder if they will ever fix the issue of dropped/delayed messages. I just want to replace Hangouts as my wife's and my default form of communication and I would love it if Matrix worked well enough for that. As it stands, regular old SMS is even more reliable for me.

I guess call me an idiot because I didn't know you could log into your Plex server from the official Plex site. I'v always gone the complete self-hosted route.