The other comments already gave you some great info, but I'll just link some good documentation for anyone looking to get started. I discovered Matrix the other

The other comments already gave you some great info, but I'll just link some good documentation for anyone looking to get started. I discovered Matrix the other day and decided to set up a toy matrix-synapse server, which took less than two days' worth of free time for someone with a programming background and no serious IT expertise. Build matrix-synapse server from source: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse Install matrix-synapse server on a DO droplet (the smallest/cheapest droplet or excess resources on an existing one should be plenty): https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-matrix-synapse-on-ubuntu-16-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-inst... I hope this project gets more traction because it's a fantastic, secure, self-hosted, full-featured, (inhales), open-source version of slack/telegram/kind of discord. Not perfect yet, but really great so far. Even pretty easy to set up e2e-encrypted voice and video calling through your server.