this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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I want to selfhost a messaging service for my family. It should be secure and have voice calling option, ideally. Thank you.

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[–] DAC_Protogen 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nextcloud looks really great and it has a chat / video chat too, I want to give it a spin in the future, as it also allows you to self-host a lot of things that people usually outsource to Microsoft, Google or Apple.

[–] styx 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The video calls in nextcloud are a bit....hard to make work flawless, lol. You also need some amount of ram and cpu in the server.

[–] DAC_Protogen 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think you always need some amount of ram and cpu in a server... ;D Well, it's a shame if those video calls aren't working nicely without some fiddling. I'll still set up a Nextcloud at some point, for all that other stuff like calendar, contacts, office, chat and file sync. Kinda enjoying the benefits of cloud synced data, but without a corporation hosting my information and selling me to the advertisement hyenas.

[–] styx 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Heh true that. AFAIR Nextcloud Talk Video calls need few additional stuff to be installed for working outside a LAN. You can check some details here: https://nextcloud-talk.readthedocs.io/en/latest/TURN/

[–] TrinityTek 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use Nextcloud Talk video calls outside my local LAN and I didn't do anything special other than install the Talk app.

[–] styx 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Nice. Either you are lucky or I'm unlucky :). I have used it with my previous vps which only had 2 GB ram (%94 always full with services and stuff) and 1 core. The experience was not very...convincing. I have yet to test it with my new server though.

[–] TrinityTek 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My ODroid H3+ running my Nextcloud instance is pretty over-specced, with 32 GB RAM and a 2 TB m.2 SSD, so that might explain the differing results. I'm surprised it runs so poorly on less capable hardware though. I actually have another Nextcloud instance running on a minimally specced VPS. I'll test Talk on that instance this evening and see if my results are similar to yours.

[–] styx 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That will be a good test. It will be greatly appreciated if you post your results here or on a separate thread.

[–] TrinityTek 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was working on this last night. I had a video call going from my phone on a wireless carrier and my laptop on my home internet using a video call from a Nextcloud instance running on a GoDaddy 1GB RAM 1 core VPS. I left the call running for a good while and was monitoring the server resources. It was using most of the RAM, but with only 1GB that's really not surprising. The CPU usage was pretty low. I would have taken a screenshot but then I managed to crash my laptop working on some other things than the video test at the same time which was dumb on my part. I'll test it more though and let you know how it goes. From what I can see it seemed to work OK but this was just one video call. For multiple simultaneous calls it would probably struggle I guess. Maybe I'll test that too, or at least add another camera into a call.

[–] styx 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the info. I tried to have a lecture with 5 of my students and we lost the service when the screen sharing begun (lol). At that time I only had around 350 MB ram free so I think it hit 0 at some point and caused the crash. I am planning to test it with my new server (16GB ram 8 core) where I haven't done any additional config for nextcloud.