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Use Signal. It’s pretty secure and private and the best thing about it is that it’s also FOSS!
Yea, I use Signal with my in real life friends, I just wanted a website alternative to use with friends i make online
(nvm, found ZulipChat)
Have normal friends? Signal. It just works. Have difficult/paranoid friends? See the other commenter’s imgur idea.
You can use OnionShare to host a chat instance on the Web over Tor.
You and your friend should…
- create and exchange a set of Age public keys
- use them to encrypt a simple text file
- bzip the encrypted file
- convert the binary archive to base64
- embed the base64 using Pixelknot into a photo downloaded from unsplash that contains a distinct object you both agreed on (eg a windmill)
- upload the file to imgur
Now you both can privately chat with each other by monitoring imgur’s latest uploads, downloading every image that contains a windmill, read the base64 string, convert it to its binary bzip form, unpack the encrypted file and decrypt it.
Encrypt what you want to say and use whatever means of transport you want.
Self hosted rocketchat or Jitsi?
This question is so generic with added weird statements, there are literally dozens of solutions with little research. Due to this I assume you haven’t formulated all your requirements and want us to get them out of you.
There ain’t really much requirements to make a big post listing them. I just want a place to chat with my friends.
Well then, literally almost ANY chat daemon you can install in any Linux will just do. And there are loads!
If you want to pay a provider to do that or rent a cheap Vs and do it yourself is another thing.
So if some guidance is all you need that’s fine and something I’ll gladly provide. Rocketchat - as someone else already posted - is relatively recent but also quite modern due to this, running in browser, app or mobile (but quite the overkill für a handful of people).
Any really old IRC based daemon would not require any resources by today’s standards and still run perfectly for your case. But it’s very old standards might not fit your expectations.
IRC with tor or i2p should fit the bill. On mobile you can use orbot to have the tor service running in the background and then configure your IRC client to use the correct port (5050? Can’t quite remember).
- Element is just a frontend for Matrix
- It does work on mobile
- It also has an app.
- I get it and I agree, it is problematic and slow.
That being said there are endless private chat options:
- Briar
- Cwtch
- Quiet
- Wire
- Session
- Threema
etc. etc. Signal is the “easy” button and even my parents are able to set it up themselves and use it without my assistance.
My favorite is SimpleX.
This is the only one I can think of ATM that runs in the browser: https://github.com/positive-intentions/chat
Jabber with encryption is good.
