A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Gonna take this in a different direction. Sounds like you mostly want notes with attachments and organization, but you're just using chat apps for it right now.
Joplin does all the things you're talking about, including multiple backends and encryption. No need to host a server.
Check out xmpp. Wouldn't know of anything remotely as useful as tgram. If it's just about messaging yourself, you could also continue using tgram and doing your own encryption with your own bot for sensible data.
I use SimpleX for this matter. Each device get its own account, and I just create a group named "self" with all of them. You can selfhost the server too if you prefer that route.
Oops, added a suggestion of Simplex before I saw your answer. +1, I guess 🙂
Simplex chat has a default "private notes" chat which is essentially chatting with yourself as you describe it.
Simplex is available for a lot of platforms and devices, and easier to install and maintain than Nextcloud. I'm not sure if it ticks all your boxes, though?
Matrix seems like a perfect fit for you then!
well search is not that good, it can only find exact word matches for any of the words, but otherwise yeah. though I think telegram isn't much better at this either
Isn't that client dependent?
Search is definitely lacking sadly. Unsure if there's even solid plans to make it much better either.
I don't do a lot of message searching so luckily for me, it's not something that bothers me too much.
Have you consider using a note taking app with server sync instead of abusing a chat service for the same thing?
I fully understand the argument and kinda agree. That said, here's why i still use the Telegram self-chat just like OP, you can suggest a note-taking app replacement if you think:
Gimme a note taking app that has all these, that is not a big program needing lots of resources to run all the time, and that i can self-host for the server part (or E2EE P2P like Syncthing) and we're cooking!
and also, time of "saving" is always correctly preserved
Telegram private 🙃
How about pushbullet? It's not self-hosted though, but syncs nicely between different phones and browser plugin. File transfer etc. works well, the search is rudimentary.
Honestly I'm not sure about offline support though, I haven't really been in a situation where I wanted to take a note/message myself without internet connection.
Since i use the self-chat on Telegram a lot i've wished for exactly the same thing in the past as i'm planning on leaving the service, so far haven't found a right fit yet