New BSD Cafe Service: ntfy Server at BSD Cafe

Push notifications have been part of our lives for almost twenty years now. Our days are often punctuated by notifications of all kinds: a new message from the bank, a chat among friends, the work group, the ever-present social networks. All these notifications often have one thing in common: they pass through the servers of our smartphone operating system manufacturers, primarily Apple and Google.

It’s part of the implementation, and that’s fine. But we need to be aware that these notifications reveal a lot about us: in the best case, metadata (meaning they know who sends them to us, the size, etc.). In the worst case, the entire content. Sure, we have nothing to hide. But this morning, when I received a bank transfer from a client, I didn’t lean out the window shouting to the whole neighborhood that a transfer had arrived from that client, of a specific amount, with a specific reference.

UnifiedPush is a protocol that allows creating a different infrastructure for notification distribution. Notifications use WebPush, so they’re encrypted by the sender (e.g., Mastodon or Matrix server) and decrypted by the device. The server, therefore, doesn’t see the notification content itself.

The Service

I’m announcing a service that has already been active for some time – almost a year – on BSD Cafe servers. It’s an ntfy server, and the rationale is simple: if you use it for BSD Cafe services (like Mastodon and Matrix), no notification or data will leave BSD Cafe servers to pass through third parties: from BSD Cafe server, to BSD Cafe ntfy, to your device.

Server address: https://ntfy.bsd.cafe

Obviously it’s not limited only to BSD Cafe services, but you can use it with any other service that supports ntfy or UnifiedPush.

How to Use It

Just install the ntfy app (available on F-Droid, Play Store, etc.), go to settings and set https://ntfy.bsd.cafe as the server. From that moment on, any app opening a UnifiedPush channel will do so through that server.

The server is also accessible via pure https, from a browser: https://ntfy.bsd.cafe

From there you can also create a topic, subscribe, and send or receive messages and updates.

Why

The goal is, also with this service, to provide another opportunity to access content and services without necessarily depending on a fixed provider, because monoculture is and will always be a problem.

The service is available to everyone. Happy notifications!