Selfhosted @lemmy.world butter @midwest.social 11 mo. ago

Looking for a better SMS system.

I'm very tired of SMS being horrible and necessary. Matrix has a bridge for SMS, but it doesn't work very well. There's other SMS bridges, no idea how well they work.

Does anyone have a good solution for dealing with SMS?

17 comments

You could consider using something like jmp.chat. It delivers SMS via XMPP (aka jabber), so you could self-host a XMPP server and receive SMS that way. It also has some support for MMS (group chat, media), but my experience with it was mixed (I used it for about 3-4 years).
- Would this require I leave my phone at home? Not a deal breaker, just curious.
  
  No, but basically jmp.chat takes over your phone number... it acts as your carrier for voice and SMS (similar to Google Voice). Maybe not exactly what you want.
  
  From the FAQ:
  
  You can use JMP to communicate with your contacts without them changing anything on their end, just like with any other telephone provider. JMP works wherever you have an Internet connection. JMP can be used alongside, or instead of, a traditional wireless carrier subscription.
  
  The benefit of this is that you can receive voice and text on anything that can serve as a XMPP client.
Beeper.com ? They have a selfhosted option. I'm using the non-self hosted as of today and it's been pretty great. Mainly sms bridge and discord bridge are what I have been using.
- I'd second this, their SMS bridge has been working great for me too (also not yet self-hosted).
- I've signed up. Now I wait.
  
  @butter @Elegast it took me a while to get my invite. Probably about a month?
It's not (yet) a good solution, but I suffer with voip.ms, and it is slowly improving.
- Just curious. Do you pay for a separate data connection? Or do you manage to only exist in WiFi?
Have you tried the new SMS bridge that relies on gmessages?

https://github.com/mautrix/gmessages

If you have an Android phone you can use the Google SMS app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.messaging

Then you pair the app and bridge. It's been pretty reliable since I started using this bridge, especially when compared to the previous bridge options.
- Ooooo. No I haven't. Is it faster than the old bridge?
  
  I don't know how slow the old one was, but if I send myself an SMS using the bridge it completes a round trip to the Telco and back in about 1 second
what benefit is this compared to leaving this as is with your telco? if you setup some solution wont your telco get a copy of sms anyway? it would be nice if telco can't see sms.
- As much as I love doing something that takes a bunch of work for privacy reasons, this is actually because cellular sucks. I have dead spots in my office and I can only reply from my phone
  
  ah I see. so by connecting your sms to a wifi service eg xmpp or matrix bridge, you will get notification of sms. I think is what ur aiming at. tx.

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