Our own chat

A team that works together talks every day: a question, a decision, a link, a "running late". Too often that happens in a WhatsApp group, where every member gives a phone number and the group's history belongs to someone else.

Paramira now has its own chat, at chat.paramira.org. It is built on Matrix, an open standard, with Element as the app, and runs on our own server. You sign in with your Paramira account: no new password, no phone number. Private rooms are end-to-end encrypted, so the server keeps them but can't read them.

We set it up the way we set up every tool we didn't write ourselves. We checked it first: its licence, how it signs people in, and every request it makes, in a real browser. By default it would talk to other servers: for statistics, for keys, to fetch the links people post, and to an integration service. We turned all of that off. Our chat talks to no other server.

We also say plainly what the server can see. It can't read an encrypted room, but it knows who is in which room and when they write. Messages are kept for a year. Android phones can get notifications through our own ntfy server, so neither Google nor Element learns when a message arrives.

The Chat tool page explains how to use it and what to know. The recipe is public, so a community can run the same chat on its own server, or ask us to set it up.