Chat software for home assistant

Has anyone set up any kind of chat software directly on their home assistant server? This would be for familyor people who live in the same household.

I do not know that it is really needed in todays world.

Then why ask?

curiosity. Same reason people climb mt everest. I want to know if it is possible.

Yes it’s possible. An add-on/app could be developed for it if there isn’t one already.

You could use i.e the Shopping-list, for that purpose, just remember to remove your lengthily family household Chats :laughing: , which you all perform from your Phones …

why involve HA, just to give HA extra Usage, writing to disks etc, when Your can use any Native features or apps on your Phone, for this

I want to move away from big services like google amazon etc… as much as possible, and privatize everything.

But I want to be able to do voice, video, text, images, and send videos etc.. . ..

Home assistant has been the first server many people has ran and got them into this selfhost hobby but allow me to remove the foreskin from you. While ha is great its not the ceiling nor the doorman for whats truly possible.

When you think smart home you assume it must intergrate or work with ha in some way and that not the case at all, host an instance of dockploy and create smart applications, im sure theres a ton already.

We live in an era where you can literally make anything you desire :slight_smile: and i self host plenty of self made software in fact the con ed addon in my signature was originally a web application on my dockploy server before porting to be an addon :slight_smile:

1 Like

Sounds like you need something like a Local Facebook/Facetime-server, For sure HA will not cope with those “demands” like little bro and you “chatting in a video-conf” while mom and dad do the same, and next you send various videos to eachother which also have to be Stored on HA etc. etc.
Considering your “Time” in HA’s Forum i advice you to … Keep it simple, in the beginning, and follow i.e zodykings advice … look for alternative solution for those “Demands/Features”
An i.e local Webserver, with the those various Features/Apps , accounts etc. etc. is more realistic

it SOUNDS like they want their own mastodon instance:

linuxserver/mastodon - Docker Image

1 Like

I do not have a job, and am looking for work.

So I need to keep myself busy, and occupied, and now that I discovered how easy it is to set up certain server software, I want to do more. I have wanted to do my own private chat server for years, but just never had the motivation until now.

Nathan’s Mastadon is a great choice for a rich experience.

Another option is to run an XMPP server.

E.g. https://ejabberd.im/

It even supports MQTT, so you can integrate part of it with HA, for some reason, if you wanted to.

It’s also open source en free (FOSS) for small installations, and it’s lightweight.

I maintained one of the world’s largest installations of this 15-20 years ago. Facebook’s IM core also used to run this (don’t know if they do anymore, because it likely uses the WhatsApp core now).

Lots of great Ideas, Thanks everyone.