Firstly, I wish you the best of luck in your community’s journey away from Discord. This may be a good time to assess what your community needs from a new platform, since Discord targeted various use-cases that no single replacement platform can hope to replace in full. Instead, by identifying exactly what your group needs and doesn’t need, that will steer you in the right direction.

As for Element, bear in mind that their community and paid versions do not exactly target a hobbyist self-hosting clientele. Instead, Element is apparently geared more for enterprise on-premises deployment (like Slack, Atlassian JIRA, Asterisk PBX) and that’s probably why the community version is also based on Kubernetes. This doesn’t mean you can’t use it, but their assumptions about deployments are that you have an on-premises cloud.

Fortunately, there are other Matrix homeservers available, including one written in Rust that has both bare metal and Docker deployment instructions. Note that I’m not endorsing this implementation, but only know of it through this FOSDEM talk describing how they dealt with malicious actors.

As an aside, I have briefly considered Matrix before as a group communications platform, but was put off by their poor E2EE decisions, for both the main client implementation and in the protocol itself. Odd as it sounds, poor encryption is worse than no encryption, because of the false assurance it gives. If I did use Matrix, I would not enable E2EE because it doesn’t offer me many privacy guarantees, compared to say, Signal.

Obligatory mention: [email protected]

Are ham radio operators in the EU able to use LoRa radios and be exempt from duty cycle limitations?

Admittedly, I haven’t finished reflashing my formerly-Meshtastic LoRA radios with MeshCore yet, so I haven’t been able to play around with it yet. Although both mesh technologies are decent sized near me, I was swayed to MeshCore because I started looking into how the mesh algorithm works for both. No extra license, since MeshCore supports roughly the same hardware as Meshtastic.

And what I learned – esp from following the #meshtastic and #meshcore hashtags on Mastodon – is that Meshtastic has some awful flooding behavior to send messages. Having worked in computer networks, this is a recipe for limiting the max size and performance of the mesh. Whereas MeshCore has a more sensible routing protocol for passing messages along.

My opinion is that mesh networking’s most important use-case should be reliability, since when everything else (eg fibre, cellular, landlines) stops working, people should be able to self organize and build a working communications system. This includes scenarios where people are sparsely spaced (eg hurricane disaster with people on rooftops awaiting rescue) but also extremely dense scenarios (eg a protest where the authorities intentionally shut off phone towers, or a Taylor Swift concert where data networks are completely congested). Meshtastic’s flooding would struggle in the latter scenario, to send a distress message away from the immediate vicinity. Whereas MeshCore would at least try to intelligently route through nodes that didn’t already receive the initial message.

Very interesting! Im no longer pursuing Meshtastic – I’m changing over my hardware to run MeshCore now – but this is quite a neat thing you’ve done here.

As an aside, if you later want to have full networking connectivity (Layer 2) using the same style of encoding the data as messages, PPP is what could do that. If transported over Meshtastic, PPP could give you a standard IP network, and on top of that, you could use SSH to securely access your remote machine.

It would probably be very slow, but PPP was also used for dial-up so it’s very accommodating. The limiting factor would be whether the Meshtastic local mesh would be jammed up from so many messages.

Sadly, I’m not familiar enough with Nginx Proxy Manager to know. But I would imagine that there must be a different way to achieve the same result.

BTW, when I read “NPM”, I first think of Node.JS Package Manager. The title of your post may be confusing, and you might consider editing it to spell out the name of Nginx Proxy Manager.

I’ll take a stab at the question. But I’ll need to lay some foundational background information.

When an adversarial network is blocking connections to the Signal servers, the Signal app will not function. Outbound messages will still be encrypted, but they can’t be delivered to their intended destination. The remedy is to use a proxy, which is a server that isn’t blocked by the adversarial network and which will act as a relay, forwarding all packets to the Signal servers. The proxy cannot decrypt any of the messages, and a malicious proxy is no worse than blocking access to the Signal servers directly. A Signal proxy specifically forwards only to/from the Signal servers; this is not an open proxy.

The Signal TLS Proxy repo contains a Docker Compose file, which will launch Nginx as a reverse proxy. When a Signal app connects to the proxy at port 80 or 443, the proxy will – in the background – open a connection to the Signal servers. That’s basically all it does. They ostensibly wrote the proxy as a Docker Compose file, because that’s fairly easy to set up for most people.

But now, in your situation, you already have a reverse proxy for your selfhosting stack. While you could run Signal’s reverse proxy in the background and then have your main reverse proxy forward to that one, it would make more sense to configure your main reverse proxy to directly do what the Signal reverse proxy would do.

That is, when your main proxy sees one of the dozen subdomains for the Signal server, it should perform reverse proxying to those subdomains. Normally, for the rest of your self hosting arrangement, the reverse proxy would target some container that is running on your LAN. But in this specific case, the target is actually out on the public Internet. So the original connection comes in from the Internet, and the target is somewhere out there too. Your reverse proxy simply is a relay station.

There is nothing particularly special about Signal choosing to use Nginx in reverse proxy mode, in that repo. But it happens to be that you are already using Nginx Proxy Manager. So it’s reasonable to try porting Signal’s configuration file so that it runs natively with your Nginx Proxy Manager.

What happens if Signal updates that repo to include a new subdomain? Well, you wouldn’t receive that update unless you specifically check for it. And then update your proxy configuration. So that’s one downside.

But seeing as the Signal app demands port 80 and 443, and you already use those ports for your reverse proxy, there is no way to avoid programming your reverse proxy to know the dozen subdomains. Your main reverse proxy cannot send the packets to the Signal reverse proxy if your main proxy cannot even identify that traffic.

The full-blown solution would be to have your own recursive DNS server on your local network, and to block or redirect any other DNS server to your own, and possibly blocking all know DoH servers.

This would solve the DNS leakage issue, since your recursive server would learn the authoritative NS for your domain, and so would contact that NS directly when processing any queries for any of your subdomains. This cuts out the possibility of any espionage by your ISP/Google/Quad9’s DNS servers, because they’re now uninvolved. That said, your ISP could still spy in the raw traffic to the authoritative NS, but from your experiment, they don’t seem to be doing that.

Is a recursive DNS server at home a tad extreme? I used to think so, but we now have people running Pi-hole and similar software, which can run in recursive mode (being built atop Unbound, the DNS server software).

/<minor nitpick>

“It was DNS” typically means that name resolution failed or did not propagate per its specification. Whereas I’m of the opinion that if DNS is working as expected, then it’s hard to pin the blame on DNS. For example, forgetting to renew a domain is not a DNS problem. And setting a bad TTL or a bad record is not a DNS problem (but may be a problem with your DNS software). And so too do I think that DNS leakage is not a DNS problem, because the protocol itself is functioning as documented.

It’s just that the operators of the upstream servers see dollar-signs by selling their user’s data. Not DNS, but rather a capitalism problem, IMO.

/</minor nitpick>

I loaded True Nas onto the internal SSD and swapped out the HDD drive that came with it for a 10tb drive.

Do I understand that you currently have a SATA SSD and a 10TB SATA HDD plugged into this machine?

If so, it seems like a SATA power splitter that divides the power to the SSD would suffice, in spite of the computer store’s admonition. The reason for splitting power from the SSD is because an SSD draws much less power than spinning rust.

Can it still go wrong? Yes, but that’s the inherent risk when pushing beyond the design criteria of what this machine was originally built for. That said, “going wrong” typically means “won’t turn on”, not “halt and catch fire”.

If I understand the Encryption Markdown page, it appears the public/private key are primarily to protect the data at-rest? But then both keys are stored on the server, although protected by the passphrase for the keys.

So if the protection boils down to the passphrase, what is the point of having the user upload their own keypair? Are the notes ever exported from the instance while still being encrypted by the user’s keypair?

Also, why PGP? PGP may be readily available, but it’s definitely not an example of user-friendliness, as exemplified by its lack of broad acceptance by non-tech users or non-government users.

And then, why RSA? Or are other key algorithms supported as well, like ed25519?

Concrete example of threat modeling: if someone found out I was using Signal, for any reason at all, would that cause problems for me?

If yes, then Signal is not a good option. If no, then Signal may be appropriate. Why? Because in their documentation, they explicitly state that while messages are confidential, the fact that you’re using Signal cannot be hidden, and so they don’t make that guarantee.

Tbf, can’t the other party mess it up with signal too?

Yes, but this is where threat modeling comes into play. Grossly simplified, developing a threat model means to assess what sort of attackers you reasonably expect to make an attempt on you. For some people, their greatest concern is their conservative parents finding out that they’re on birth control. For others, they might be a journalist trying to maintain confidentiality of an informant from a rogue sheriff’s department in rural America. Yet others face the risk of a nation-state’s intelligence service trying to find their location while in exile.

For each of these users, they have different potential attackers. And Signal is well suited for the first two, and only alright against the third. After all, if the CIA or Mossad is following someone around IRL, there are other ways to crack their communications.

What Signal specifically offers is confidentiality in transit, meaning that all ISPs, WiFi networks, CDNs, VPNs, script skiddies with Wireshark, and network admins in the path of a Signal convo cannot see the contents of those messages.

Can the messages be captured at the endpoints? Yes! Someone could be standing right behind you, taking photos of your screen. Can the size or metadata of each message reveal the type of message (eg text, photo, video)? Yes, but that’s akin to feeling the shape of an envelope. Only through additional context can the contents be known (eg a parcel in the shape of a guitar case).

Signal also benefits from the network effect, because someone trying to get away from an abusive SO has plausible deniability if they download Signal on their phone (“all my friends are on Signal” or “the doctor said it’s more secure than email”). Or a whistleblower can send a message to a journalist that included their Signal username in a printed newspaper. The best place to hide a tree is in a forest. We protect us.

My main issue for signal is (mostly iPhone users) download it “just for protests” (ffs) and then delete it, but don’t relinquish their acct, so when I text them using signal it dies in limbo as they either deleted the app or never check it and don’t allow notifs

Alas, this is an issue with all messaging apps, if people delete the app without closing their account. I’m not sure if there’s anything Signal can do about this, but the base guarantees still hold: either the message is securely delivered to their app, or it never gets seen. But the confidentiality should always be maintained.

I’m glossing over a lot of cryptographic guarantees, but for one-to-one or small-group private messaging, Signal is the best mainstream app at the moment. For secure group messaging, like organizing hundreds of people for a protest, that is still up for grabs, because even if an app was 100% secure, any one of those persons can leak the message to an attacker. More participants means more potential for leaks.

When I see E2EE and XMPP mentioned, I think of this blog post by Soatok, outlining some very odd cryptographic choices in XMPP + OMEMO: https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/

I would very much like to see a richer playing field than just Signal for private messaging, but it’s a tough nut to crack. For exactly which aspect that turns me away from XMPP for E2EE, I think this nails it down:

you only need check whether OMEMO is on by default (it isn’t), or whether OMEMO can be turned off even if your client supports it (it can).

When the competition is Signal, these sorts of details matter a lot.