Good morning /c/selfhosted!
I run a Jellyfin server, complete with Jellyseerr, Sonarr, Radarr, the works. This has been a fantastic learning experience, and I’ve learned so much about networking, docker-compose, and what terrible tragedies and lost work can occur when you do not RTFM.
Now that it is up and running and stable(ish), I have invited friends and family to the instance. It is securely attached to my domain, and currently I have about 12 users.
Now, I have run into an issue: I need a centralized way for them to get notifications on new content and their requests being fulfilled, and a centralized way for all of them to contact me. Right now, it’s a messy combination of sms/email/discord/phone calls.
My thought: I would love a self-hosted messaging client!
I’m wondering if anyone knows of any messaging clients that meet the following criteria:
- Grandma-level user friendliness, if possible
- One-way multi-user broadcast option
- Jellyseerr integration, or some back-assward way to get it to work with one of Jellyseerr’s integrations
- little user-to-user communication
Ultimately, my goal is the following: An app that I can use for users to submit questions and bug reports, and that I can use to broadcast news and updates, downtime notifications, and other messaging. Ideally, one that supports a “bcc” option. An additional caveat is that the users should not be able to easily find and message each other, I don’t need my conservative coworkers meeting the queer ass polycule that makes up 20% of my users.
This exact situation is why I eventually shut down access to my media server to only my household. I had the same setup for many years and it just got to be a clusterfuck of people messaging me that things were broken, not working how they wanted, need to have more features, aren’t working fast enough, etc. I work in IT. I get enough of that when I’m clocked in, I don’t need it at home too.
Good luck though, OP.
I started one month ago using sonarr, radarr and all that stuff. It has integration with telegram, maybe you could create a group or a channel. It’s not selfhosted but more or less is user friendly thinking about grandma-level
For the notifications I would use https://ntfy.sh/ but that doesn’t give you the return channel.
Somehow you are describing an „email“…
Problem with you approach is, that you have an easier maintenance, but your users need an additional tool. Especially when grandparents should use this, you should stick to what is there.
In theory you could host a matrix server and install some bridges like whatsapp, discord, etc. probably you would be able to create a matrix room and invite your granny via the whatsapp integration, your friends via discord, etc.
Disclaimer: I did not set up such solution - this just came to mind for your situation.
Hah, very fair. Trouble I’m having is that my friend group aren’t the type to check their emails, so that takes care of grandma-demographic but does not take care of the “social media please fill my inbox” demographic. Matrix is definitely where I’m leaning, that has other applications for me anyway.
You should look into setting up a matrix server, it will be more challenging than setting up jellyfin, but then you’re gonna have an experience that’s comparable to discord.
For your grandma, or other non-tech-savy users I recommend checking out the matrix client FluffyChat, which looks like a traditional messaging app
