Ask HN: How did you convince family and friends to join your XMPP/Matrix server?

Re:Ask HN: How did you convince family and friends to join y... by MattJ100 on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:26AM (#50405349)

Curious if you've tried Snikket, and what hurdles you ran into (if you did). I made it with the primary purpose of moving my family communication over to XMPP, and I succeeded with that (improving a bunch of stuff in the process). I'm not claiming it's perfect (a known weak point is the iOS app, but we're actively working on solving that...)

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Re:Ask HN: How did you convince family and friends to join y... by mtlynch on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:59AM (#50405626)

Thanks for creating Snikket!

I tried Snikket and ejabberd on the server and found Snikket way easier to use.

I haven't tried any Snikket clients because I'm tinkering with web apps to start and it looks like Snikket doesn't have a web client yet outside of the admin portal.

I really like that Snikket allows me to create invitations without relying on SMTP. I love having it just as a URL I can send however I want.

I wish I kept better notes on my Snikket onboarding because I did run into a few hiccups.

I find the concept of "Circles" unclear because I don't understand how it differs from regular users. Thinking about it more, I'm assuming the idea is that I might have a family group and a college friends group, but I don't want my dumb college friends messaging my mom even though they're all on the same server?

My more superficial note is that I find the admin UX a little rough. It feels a little early 2000s design where everything is a form submit when there could be more JS interactivity (and this is coming from someone who hates JS frameworks but likes minimalist JS like htmx). And there are four top-level admin actions, and one of them is "Invitations" but that seems to duplicate everything available to me under "Users."

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Re:Ask HN: How did you convince family and friends to join y... by MattJ100 on Saturday November 07, 2026 @11:15AM (#50405736)

Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, no web client yet, but we're working on a web app (it exists already, but doesn't do end-to-end encryption fully yet, also no video calls). My primary use case for Snikket was displacing things like WhatsApp where web usage is (in my experience) rare, so the focus has been on mobile apps.

Circles - yes, you got it. Initially we launched without circles, and some people complained they couldn't invite friends to their server without those friends mixing with their family members by default. I wasn't sure at first, but now even use this feature myself for e.g. a "Games night" circle. You can read more about the feature here: https://snikket.org/service/help/features/circles/

And yes, I totally get what you mean about the web dashboard. We're toying with replacing it at some point (partly because the backend is Python, and it uses over 2x the RAM of the chat server when idle!).

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Re:Ask HN: How did you convince family and friends to join y... by cf100clunk on Saturday November 07, 2026 @11:25AM (#50405807)

''right now we want to focus on doing one thing and doing it well''

https://snikket.org/about/goals

kudos to that!

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