undu

You might want to take a look at https://github.com/olivierlambert/calrs

it was made as a reaction to cal.com not meeting the needs of the creator, like being selfhood table and being caldav compatible.

Note that I cannot vouch for it since I have not used it.

Of the ones I’ve tried that are fully open-source, zulip is the best one regarding UX functionality.

I’ve found Matrix is a UX nightmare, with many different clients implementing different features, or having issues if a non-default login mode is used, ending in people getting locked out after the browser logged them out because they forgot to copy a key when they were logged in.

Others like rocketchat are opencore like matter most, which means they can do the switcheroo.

The things I would care the most when checking this kind of service are:

• UX: how easy it is to use for nontechnical users
• how well-backed is the project, socially and financially, to ensure it lasts a long time
• how easy it is to get the (public) conversations out, as an exit strategy, if the one above isn’t looking so good.

Vates demoed on kubecon an ARM workstation running XCP-ng, a xen-based virtualization platform.

https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2025/11/13/xcp-ng-on-arm-with-ampere/

It’s still early days, but I’m hoping it can reach homelabs, the big question being hardware enablement, which is difficult on ARM baseboards due to lack of standardization.

Disclaimer: I work with Vates, and prepared some component to compile under ARM to prepare the demo.

I know, yes. But I’m talking about virtualization, not containerizarion

Personally, I want to properly isolate the services with virtualization. The main reason is I expose some of the services online, and I don’t t want to only rely on keeping all software up-to-date at all times. This allows me to limit the damage if one of the services is compromised.

I wouldn’t use MacOS as the virtualization platform, and instead use something else, like BSD, Linux, or xen-based for my servers