Help with Mollysocket

Questions
1

Hi,

For the sake of the battery, it is no longer reasonable for me to run Signal on GrapheneOS. However, I am currently unable to host my own Mollysocket. What open options are available and which ones are best? I have found the following:

Many thanks in advance!

2

The point of the mollysocket is to allow you to use Molly with unifiedpush. It’s only worth it if you’re already using other apps that use UP, otherwise you can use the websocket based notifications directly. There are no battery gains over websocket if it’s your only UP app.

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3

What other apps for example can you use with UP instead?

4

Element, FMD, home assistant, tusky, etc… list here: Apps using UnifiedPush | UnifiedPush

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5

TIL about that website. Thank you!

6

Do anyone know what Ironfox using UnifiedPush for?

7

I’m not sure you’re right here. On the GrapheneOS forum, there is plenty of evidence that battery consumption is reduced when using Unifiedpush instead of the built-in socket.

8

I think this also depends on whether you’ve ever had google play services installed. On one gos phone, which had play services installed in the private space only, molly foss in my main space accounted for about half my battery consumption and my battery lasted barely a day with average use (no streaming). On another gos phone which has never had play services installed, molly foss (with unrestricted background usage) uses less battery than my launcher. I’m not sure why this matters, but it seems to. I’ve seen it written about in several places, but I didn’t bookmark them. Maybe someone with more knowledge of how molly foss is actually searching for notifications could comment. It could possibly be worth it to try a totally fresh install and never install google play services. The difference is notable.

9

I don’t see the logic in that, so I’d need to see a technical explanation. No matter what you use, there’s gotta be a websocket connection active for you somewhere to be able to get push notifications. That connection can be to an UP server or directly to the signal one. UP is better if you use multiple UP-supporting apps so that they can share it instead of all creating their own direct one.

10

I don’t believe that Home Assistant has UnifiedPush support (yet).

11

It does and I used to use it, but not anymore as I now send any notifications through Signal instead. The HA integration for UP support: ntfy - Home Assistant

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12

Thanks, it’s been a while since I revisited by HA setup. I set it up years ago and haven’t touched it since, but I apparently missed this feature.

13

I’ve been writing up a long blog-type post that I was going to post here too about the downsides for your anonymity + privacy of self-hosting and really using any super niche services like UP here. Why? Such services will have unique URLs/IPs that only you or very few other people in the world are using which may uniquely identify you and allow you to be tracked across networks. It’s better to just blend into the crowd of Signal users imo. For these reasons I’ve moved my HA push notifications to be Signal-based instead via Signal Messenger - Home Assistant I’m working on a UP → Signal self-hosted system that can do this for other UP Android apps although I’m not expecting that anybody other than me will want to use it.

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14

I don’t really see this as a problem. By construction, some self-hosted services like email, Matrix instances or game servers need to be public facing. My HA instance isn’t public facing however.

15

Well you could be using a public email service like proton to blend in :slight_smile: I don’t think you ever have to connect to a self-hosted matrix server directly from your phone, do you? The one community I’m in, I access through https://app.element.io/

My HA is public facing so that I can control it remotely and see what’s going on at home when I’m away. I disabled notifications and the ability to run in bg for the HA client app now, so it doesn’t hit my unique HA URL unless I manually open the app.

I changed:

  • vaultwarden → bitwarden (big user base to blend in and E2EE already)
  • no more ntfy server connections (I was self-hosting ntfy too :frowning: )
  • using websockets for Signal notifications and my HA sends push notifications to a private Signal group where me and my wife are the only members

I’m temporarily not using FMD and Element-X on my phone until I implement my Signal-based system that can send me push notifications for them. It’s probably a higher threat model to worry about network sniffers to identify you by the unique URLs/IPs that you use, but I thought it’d be fun to implement. I have to create a custom server + Android app for such a system, so it’s taking a bit of time.