I don’t know about Home Assistant, but I am using Glance. I love the aesthetic and that you can configure it with descriptive yaml files.

But I think this is also a question you need to ask yourself: Do you want to “click together” a dashboard aka one with a nice GUI where you can configute everything (e.g. Homarr). Or rather one with config files like Glance and a bit simpler in its feature set.

Haha nice, already searched that one on F-Droid after not finding the Dawarich Android app on there. Looking forward to it!

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

In the meantime I tried the app and it looks awesome! However, I noticed the app relies on google’s services location accuracy unfortunately. This is kind of a deal breaker for me to use the app for now. But I get that imlementing an F-Droid version is not your top priority, so I’ll follow the project and patiently wait for it :)

Are there any plans to make the android app available on F-Droid as well? Or releasing the apk in the GitHub repo so we can install it with Obtainium?

Sorry if this has already been mentioned somewhere, couldn’t find it in your post or on the website.

Yeah you could consider it old school, or maybe just a product of another time were people didn’t mind to use multiple software for different uses.

I for one don’t mind using Mumble for voice and XMPP for text chat or one to one calls for example.

I don’t have a computer or smartphone so I only can install one app and that’s it. And I know I might be in the minority when it comes to that, at least compared to the general public. For gods sake it’s already hard to get people to install a second messenger app, not even trying to get them off WhatsApp or other meta crap…

I believe group calling is only a thing certain clients (e.g. Dino, Movim) support, although there is a initiative to implement it on protocol level as far as I am aware.

If you have your own VPS anyway, there is the Matrix Ansible Playbook which makes the setup with docker containers very easy. But I also get the sentiment that you don’t want to tinker around all the time and just want stuff to work.

Kudos to you for using Matrix in the first place, I hope you can bring a lot of your friends and family to switch over to it. So far this has been the biggest hurdle on my journey 😅

I saw you recommend Continuwuity on other posts as well. Was just wondering, what made you choose Continuwuity over Tuwunel?

I am asking because I used to host a Continuwuity Matrix Server until a year ago. Recently started to look into hosting a Matrix server once again and found that Tuwunel seems currently ahead of Continuwuity in regards to WebRTC (Element Call) implementation and the sliding sync thingy.

At least they have updated documentation when it comes to WebRTC and how to set it up.

You can actually change these ports if you run Snikket behind a reverse proxy according to their advanced configuration docs. But yeah, probably going with something else than Snikket as it doesn’t really suite into my current Podman/Traefik setup. At least not without a lot of tinkering which I don’t feel like at the moment 😅

No weird opinions, you do you and if Matrix suits your needs, great. In general I like the idea and concept behind Matrix, was a bit clunky to get it going initially but afterwards, with Continuiwity as backend server I have to say I ran quite smooth. I guess for a small homelab/self hosted setup with maybe a hand full of users, XMPP sounds easier to maintain. But I guess I’ll have to find out, probably going to deploy Snikket or Ejabberd for a test run.

Only heard great things about it

Can’t speak for the Synapse hosting, as back when I hosted one myself I directly started with Dendrite (was not really that feature rich) and switched to Continuiwity soon after. And I have to agree, ran like a charm on my VPS and didn’t use a ton of resources. Granted, I was the only user so can’t say how the usage would have increased with more users active.

Yeah that’s the thing with a lot of these platforms, it’s dead simple for most people to download the app and create the account. You already loose two thirds (if not more) of the people as soon as the sign up process gets a bit more complicated, even more if they have to manage and secure any kind of secret (encryption keys) themselves. Not that it would be so difficult to save this stuff in a password manager, but I guess that’s already where a lot of people still fall short… What a uphill battle that was (still is) with some of my friends and family to get them to use a password manager for a start.

Couldn’t agree more with the first two points, especially the second one when it comes to adaptability by my non-techy friends and especially the wife-approval-factor.

I only tried out Delta Chat like two years ago linking it to a secondary Gmail account. Don’t think this really fully utilized it to its full potential. What do you like most so far about Delta Chat?

Nice blog post you wrote there, I like how you go into some details about the problems you faced hosting Matrix.

Used some of the Mautrix bridges (WhatsApp & Signal) in an attempt to combine all my messaging apps on the phone into one single app. Worked reasonably well I have to say.

The Discord bridge I never tried, mostly because my friend group is not really using the instant messaging part of Discord. We more or less only use it for voice chat while gaming or just some shit talking. Thinking about it, for this a TeamSpeak or Mumble server would probably be enough to replace our Discord usage 😄

Yeah faced that issue a couple of weeks ago as well after updating Podman. It didn’t allow me to set container individual UID/GID mappings or UserNS when running in a pod, so I just took them out of the pod as I couldn’t be bothered and run them as separate containers in the same network. Works just as good.

You just have to make sure to move the PublishPort block from the pod quadlet to the gluetun container (for all the containers which route their traffic through gluetun, i.e. which have ‘Network=container: gluetun’ set). This should solve the problem and still allows you to use UserNS or UID/GID mappings on the containers. No disadvantages so far, you just lose the convenience of stopping/starting all the containers at once through the pod. But I’d rather take this ‘inconvenience’ than troubleshooting for days how to make it work with a pod again.

Nice, good on you! Migrating your services/containers to a dedicated server instead of running them on a overwhelmingly underpowered Synology NAS is going to be a game changer.

I also have a Synology NAS, but nowadays only really use it for NFS/Samba storage and a S3 service (Garage) running on it to provide network storage to all my other services running on my mini pc.

Nice setup! Is that a Minisforum below the optiplex?

Haha I read your comment the wrong way around the first time thinking you got a Minisforum MS-01 for like €460. That would have been a great deal 😄

Because searching for what a new MS-01 with i5 and 32gb RAM and 1TB SSD cost is more towards €700. Haven’t found a lot of offerings for a used one in my region and buying new currently I think I would have to pay too much.