Chat

What it is

Chat in rooms, like the apps people already use, but on a server your community runs. You sign in with the account you already have here, so there is no new password and no phone number to give. Private rooms are end-to-end encrypted: the server keeps them, but can't read them.

It is built on Matrix, an open standard, with Element as the app (in a browser, on Android and on iPhone).

The vision

A team's daily talk shouldn't live in someone's WhatsApp group or a company's chat, where the group's history belongs to the company and every member hands over a phone number. The chat belongs to the community: its server, its accounts, its rules about how long things are kept.

Using it

1. Open chat.paramira.org and choose Sign in. You land on the usual Paramira sign-in; afterwards you're in the chat. Contributors, editors and admins can sign in.

2. Keep your recovery key when the app offers one. It lets you read your encrypted rooms again on a new phone or computer.

3. Make a room for a topic or a project, and invite people by their username.

4. On a phone, install Element X. On Android, also install ntfy, set its server to https://ntfy.paramira.org, and choose ntfy for notifications in Element X: then neither Google nor Element learns when you get a message. On iPhone, notifications go through Element's service and Apple's; they carry no message, only that something is new.

What to know

• Your chat ID is your username (@username:paramira.org), and it can't change later.

• If you lose all your devices without your recovery key, you lose the history of your encrypted rooms. Nobody, not even the server, can bring it back.

• Whoever runs the server sees who is in which room, when messages are sent and how big they are, and the names and topics of rooms. Not what is said in an encrypted room.

• Messages and files are kept for a year, then deleted; a room can ask for less.

• This server talks to no other Matrix server. People from elsewhere can't join, and nothing leaves for another server.

• For what a watched person says, the community apps' chat on the phone is the place: it goes over Tor and no server holds the conversation.

Running it yourself

The recipe (recipes/matrix in our code) is what Paramira runs: Synapse, MAS, Element and ntfy in Docker, every setting that reaches other servers turned off, sign-in through your Authentik, and a backup. You need four addresses and about 300 MB of memory. We can set it up for you for a minimum donation.