this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
84 points (92.9% liked)

Selfhosted

56957 readers
1367 users here now

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.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

  7. No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz
84
Onionphone - E2EE PTT Voice and Chat (media.piefed.social)
submitted 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) by Used_Gate@piefed.social to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
24 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Onionphone is a native Android application for anonymous, end-to-end encrypted push-to-talk voice and text communication over the Tor network. No servers, no accounts, no phone numbers — your .onion address is your identity.

Cross-platform compatible with Terminalphone — call between Android and Linux/Termux using the same protocol.

Optionally use your connection as a relay for ephermeral group channels.

Find the release page for version 1.0.2 which supports custom bridges for accessing censored networks.

top 24 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] vatlark@lemmy.world 6 points 58 minutes ago (1 children)

This is sick! Thanks for sharing your project with us! I would have never guessed you could do voice over TOR but PTT was a clever solution. Its like the old nextel phones that had PTT. I wonder if its possible to remap the volume button to be a hardware PTT button.

[–] Used_Gate@piefed.social 3 points 51 minutes ago

Happy to contribute! So, currently (only while in the app for now) you can activate the mic with a double pressdown on volume if the setting is enabled.

My attempts to trigger the mic while outside the app came with a few unwanted side affects so I removed it for now until I find a solid way to do that.

[–] Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it 5 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

@Used_Gate I suggest getting this in f-droid if you want to see more usage.

Also, it looks like the actual development happens in private and then is thrown over the fence; https://gitlab.com/here/_forawhile/onionphone/-/commit/2c4afc462a42852f0d54dda0b333db9019f3d69e

[–] Used_Gate@piefed.social 2 points 1 hour ago

Yes, I am seeking that out to put it on fdroid and actually tried but ran into a few roadblocks.

I am tracking changes since v1.0.0 in the changelog. From here on out the changes are all public. The initial commit has no history because it was brand new, and the architecture was forked from terminal phone for cross compatibility.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 7 points 2 hours ago (4 children)

Probably a bad idea to congest the limited bandwidth of Tor with voice chat.

[–] Used_Gate@piefed.social 23 points 2 hours ago

The bandwidth is low by design. I've excluded files and images to keep it down as well. You could talk 24/7 only use MBs.

If we want Tor to grow we need useful applications useful for everyone. I doubt this will be widely adopted.

I've contributed a large amount of bandwidth to the network so why can't I use some?

[–] grue@lemmy.world 3 points 47 minutes ago

Creating more mainstream use-cases is how you get people to donate more bandwidth.

[–] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 4 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Plain speech can be compressed pretty well. I'm not an expert by any means, but I suspect latency would be the bigger issue.

[–] Used_Gate@piefed.social 8 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Latency is a huge issue, but it goes away with the PTT model. I tried full duplex on initial prototyping but it was trash.

PTT solves this by simply forcing the listen, digest, then respond. You can expect about 2-3 seconds of delay from when you release the ptt, to when the other side hears it.

[–] Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it 1 points 2 hours ago

Yeah, unless they use specific nodes given by the community, i think it's a bad idea

[–] ddssazsa@piefed.social 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

What's the selfhosted component of this?

[–] Used_Gate@piefed.social 0 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Self hosting your own private P2P voice service.

Optionally use your device as a Audio relay for group calls, in which case you become the 'server' to all connected clients.

[–] IratePirate@feddit.org 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Self hosting [...] P2P

You do realise that's a contradiction, right?

Unless you're hosting a TOR node (which is outside of the scope here and, in the case of exit nodes, extremely risky), there's nothing here that's relevant to self-hosting.

[–] Used_Gate@piefed.social 4 points 1 hour ago

I don't agree with that. Both sides are acting as a server and a client, connecting via a onion service to either parties rendezvous. And then when you include the fact that you can become a relay, that is clearly self hosting a server in a pure sense.

There are no exit nodes involved in onion services. It all stays within the network.