You seem to be interested in selfhosting so I encourage you to learn and follow the other comments but... ... I'm here to remind who needs to hear this that there should exist small communities where the average member doesn't give a flying TCP packet of what "coturn" is. Using smolweb technologies doesn't need to imply operating the infrastructure.
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
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The Smol Web
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Community for the appreciation and sharing of links, resources, and culture of: the smol web / small web / ~(w)~ / the indie web / or even the non-www internet (gemini, gopher, etc).
Back of a napkin definition, subject to change: if it's internet accessible and is maintained by a person, especially for non-commercial aims, then I would consider it smol. There are, however, much stricter definitions.
Definitions
- https://smolweb.org/
- https://indieweb.org/
- https://smallweb.page/
- https://wikipedia.org/wiki/IndieWeb
- https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/small-internet.html
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I didn't think about this. Thank you, friend
At the risk of "simplifying it too much", you could try to run Snikket, the all-in-one XMPP server.
However, with prosody, follow the official docs, and set everything up incrementally. Since it's a sensible old-school software, you can get bare minimum going, then start modifying config to include modules and configuring calls etc.
I went to college for computer engineering, and what I learned in college has been pretty much entirely irrelevant to my self-hosting hobby. That said, there’s a ton to learn. The good news is that all the information on this stuff is available online for free, you’ve just got to have a good search engine that doesn’t give you slop and you should spend a lot of time reading. That’s how I got into it.
Services like Yunohost are a great place to start, but setting them up will still take some searching if you’re a beginner. Generally you can find services anywhere on the spectrum between “one-click setup” and “bare metal machine you can customize to your heart’s content” so you can navigate that spectrum as you learn more. Just try to always be security-conscious, research the security ramifications of whatever you’re doing.
A friend of mine is a cybersecurity teacher... maybe I should reach out to him. I've just switched from Ecosia to Brave for my search engine and it seems to be returning helpful options thus far. Is there anything smaller than setting up my own XMPP server that you'd suggest as a beginner option, or is it better to just dive into the deep end and read like crazy?
Yunohost should take care of most of the config automatically including LDAP. If you already run Yunohost then just try it.
Bosh and coturn are optional and you can worry about that later when you actually need it.
I don't run anything :') can I try it out on my laptop?
Yes you can try Yunohost on an old laptop but it will replace the existing OS.
Prosody (xmpp) specifically is meant to be used with a domain name etc, and the setup to run it on a local network only isn't so easy (and relatively pointless as it is a communication tool).
Oooh okay so not installing it on my laptop, got it. What do you mean a domain name, like do I need to purchase a .com from Porkbun or something like that? And what do you mean by local network, like my wifi?
You can run Yunohost on you local wifi and access it via the internal IP address that your main router assigns to your device.
But xmpp is not very helpful in such a setup as external access from the outside internet is not possible that way. You would need to configure it to be accessible on a public IP and also buy a domain name for it.
As a beginner it might be easier to rent a VPS somewhere as a lot of the technical details will be solved already.