No doubt this is my ignorance showing. My interest would be not in Matrix as such, but in a way to bring together Telegram, Signal, iMessage, and to a much lesser degree Facebook messages, into one place, and to be able to access that one place using any of my computers (Mac and Windows, mainly) and mobile devices (which are primarily Apple). That’s what Beeper says they do using their service and app–and I’ve been inferring, at least, that this capability is kind of unique to them.
If I can duplicate that behavior with my own Matrix server, appropriate bridges, and a Matrix client app, this is sounding more interesting to me.
Everything dockerized, the native matrix install on NethServer installs an old version (due to old python) that’s not compatible to for example the whatsapp bridge.
What I don’t see there (and perhaps I’m overlooking it) is a bridge to iMessage, which for me would be a big part of the value proposition.
I’m pretty new to looking at this, and I don’t doubt I’m missing a lot. Maybe I’m just looking at the wrong tool. But I’m not really interested in “chat” as such–I don’t use Slack, I don’t use RocketChat, I don’t use IRC, and I don’t use Discord (though I’ll likely be forced into that to a degree for support for a few things I use like TrueCharts). I don’t even see that I have much reason to use them–which is why I don’t.
But I do use iMessage (now called Messages), quite a bit. I use Signal some. I use Telegram a bit, mostly with bots for my telescope and my 3D printers. I don’t use Facebook Messenger much, but occasionally get a message or two there. When I see Beeper saying they can bring all those together into a single app/service, and the app in question will run on any device you want, that’s interesting to me. When they say it’s open-source and you can self-host it, that’s even more interesting to me.
But I’m starting to suspect that I’m kind of like the TrueNAS n00b with standard residential Internet (and thus a dynamic IP address) who wants remote access to his files and just doesn’t know what he doesn’t know about the complexities involved in doing so at all, much less safely. And these docs don’t do much to contradict that impression: https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/imessage/mac-nosip/setup.html
@danb35 its cool you are looking into it, because of the one reason, but then again. isnt the one reason why most people prefer a certain product to the other.
For my case, i need a chat tool. i have internal developers, and i hire freelancers form time to time, who at times might need to collaborate with internal dev teams.
Some systems services and personel are on myriads chat chanels, some use skype(whoosh) others are on discord, and others are on the other myriad solutions, whatsap, telegram etc.
I dont use imessages, dont own any apple prodcuts, except for the one laptop and iphone in the office, for when we need to build and test an app for apple.
I also ocassionally get messages form facebook, though dont use it as much. so i do require a proper messaging solution. once and for all.
since i first started playing around with matrix, it has matured and grown significantly, ma the matix standard is evolving pretty fast. so, a matrix deployment is ok for me, with but it must have the additional cool bridges, otherwise it makes no sense.
I am really also still trying to really understand bleep pretty well, but @danb35 if you ask me. matrix is a better chouse for you. i know setting up the bridges is the headache.
So I spun up a free ARM VM on Oracle Cloud (running Ubuntu 22.04) and have been messing around with the Ansible playbook installation. So far, after a few hiccups, it seems to be working well. Element, Cinny, and Hydrogen all work; I’m able to log in with Element on my phone and iPad; E2EE seems to work; Grafana works; the Telegram bridge works. Etherpad won’t install, nor will ma1sd. Next up, Signal.
wow, what a wonderful new.
that was my planned use cases, considering oracle is the only cheapest cloud provider offering servers in south Africa, with a 10 Gig connection, nifty for me.
If i am not mistaken, Matrix synapse now comes with builtin OIDC for user authentication, and since you use LLNG, you could configure the parameters, and have matrix authenticated with your LLNG instance
I think that’s pretty much what the Ansible playbook’s supposed to be.
Edit: I now have the Signal bridge installed and working as well. It’s a little more cumbersome than the Telegram one, but it still works.
Edit 2: The Ansible playbook also makes it pretty easy to modify your installation, such as by adding or removing components, just by editing the vars.yml file and re-running the playbook. Adding a bridge, or web client, or other service means adding (at most) a few lines to vars.yml and re-running. When I’m trying to take care of one thing at a time (which is what I’m doing here), that’s pretty helpful.
i had played around with it a while back, not recently though.
i see now they organised the options and the pages on github. it can be overwhealming at times in some case.
…then start with “Prerequisites” and follow the steps on down, you should be in good shape. Note that on the Oracle Could VM, I needed to manually install python3-docker (apt install python3-docker) and Docker itself (from the official Docker docs) in order for the initial installation to complete. I then needed to remove /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list to allow any subsequent runs of the playbook to complete. I don’t know if this is because it’s Oracle, because it’s Ubuntu 22, because it’s on ARM, or if it’s just a bug in the playbook, but it doesn’t seem to be the expected behavior.
Also note that, if you’re using Oracle, you’ll need to create a security policy that opens the necessary ports before you run the playbook.
Meanwhile, I have the Telegram, Signal, and Whatsapp bridges installed and running, all with e2be and double puppeting. But the playbook doesn’t handle the imessage bridge, and it looks like that one will be more complicated. But that’s really what I’d like to get running, as I probably use iMessage more than those three combined.
I´m running a personal matrix-server with gateways, database and stuff inside docker…
In my setup my nethserver-host just runs a reverse proxy (there was a thing with editing a template for the reverse proxy with an “obfuscation” (or something like this, can´t remember) argument i had to add)
and an openvpn server, to which another machine running docker and the cotainers for matrix. You don´t have to go through the VPN stuff, if you run the docker containers on your nethserver-host.
I now have the iMessage bridge up and apparently running. It’s a much more complicated installation than the other bridges I’ve installed (partially because those are directly supported by the Ansible playbooks), and requires a Mac (or VM running macOS). For the sake of not messing with the Ansible installation, I’ve chosen to run wsproxy on the Mac, and link it to the Synapse server using a ZeroTier VPN. I expect this could be adapted to the Nethserver installation, but no promises there. Here are my notes on the installation: https://www.familybrown.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=advanced:imessage_bridge
