Ntfy – open-source Push to Mobile | Hacker News Reader

Ntfy – open-source Push to Mobile

ntfy.sh

128 pointsFake4d52 comments

I'm a privacy focused self hoster and ntfy was not good enough for me so I created Prism with an optional Android app: https://git.lonecloud.dev/lone-cloud/prism

The difference: Your phone doesn't get notifications from your notification service directly, but from Mozilla which helps to hide your digital fingerprint of you using a separate notification provider like ntfy. Prism also allows Telegram or Signal to act as a notification distributor. In addition, I use Proton Mail which doesn't really allow custom notification services. Prism has a custom integration to work around that so your proton mail notifications don't have to touch google services.

Interesting, how is it able to send via Mozilla? I did a quick search in the repo and the term isn't found.

The webpush endpoint registration is initiated from the client. The Android app can act as a client and it's the one that registers Mozilla's autopush service.

In what ways is your digital fingerprint being monitored where your notification providers are being captured?

I meant that at the network level, should something be monitoring, your client would be making requests to a unique (ntfy) address that virtually nobody else ever uses. Requests to Mozilla are more crowd blended as it's quite popular already.

Aren’t the requests https?

Or you mean you are trying to hide from a network where you are mitm attacked?

Yes, they are https so security is not a concern. I want to crowd blend at the network level so that my requests don't aversive that I'm using a privacy notification system (or a VPN).

I'm the maintainer of ntfy. Happy to answer questions. Sorry that I'm late to the party :-)

Thanks for building something so sicc.

Thank you for ntfy. I self host it and love it.

The problem with ntfy for me is that I get notifications on my mobile through the ntfy app. On desktop, in the browser (Safari on Mac), I only get notification pop-ups when the website is open.

The worst part is that I don’t even see the notifications on the website that I received on my mobile while the website wasn’t open.

Go to ntfy.sh/settings and enable background notifications. Or do it like I do it an pin the tab and just leave it open.

Unless you have a pro account, notifications are only cached on the server for 12h so that's why you may miss old notifications.

Thank you so much for this perfect product It completely fulfilled my needs

And the opportunity to host it by myself is really useful The best of both worlds

Thank you very much for your hard work

I've been using Gotify [1] for a very long time and have been quite happy with it. Basically no impact on battery life. For devs - there are mature libraries like shoutrr [2] and apprise [3] that let you support multiple notification systems with no extra work.

1. https://gotify.net/

2. https://shoutrrr.nickfedor.com/v0.17.0/

3. https://github.com/caronc/apprise

Right, but if you use ntfy.sh you can get proper mobile push notifications (instead of keeping the app running and using long polling or websockets).

If you use the public version of ntfy.sh then you don't need to do anything to set this up. If you self-host, you need your own Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) account and (for iOS) your own Apple Developer account so you can use APN.

Personally I use FCM (Firebase push notifications) with a Capacitor plugin for push notifications, it works decently

I didn't know what you meant by Capacitor, but I now understand it's a modern replacement for Apache Cordova: https://capacitorjs.com/

Yes exactly, it's an easy way to build a web-based app and run it on iOS and Android, accessing the native API through a javascript bridge. There's also NativeScript in that space

Publicly hosted version is nearly useless if you'd like to use it to send notifications from your tiny workers/scripts/processes in the big datacentres - I have a minuscule worker in CF that needs to send one notification once every few days, and I *ALWAYS* get a 429. Always.

So this is good maybe if you're using it to sent from your laptop to your phone.

Who cares? Battery consumption of Gotify is negligible (it uses websockets). Same with CPU/RAM. What's the benefit of giving Google your notifications?

Also the docs point out >Using Firebase is optional and only works if you modify and build your own Android .apk. For a self-hosted instance, it's easier to just not bother with FCM.

https://docs.ntfy.sh/config/#firebase-fcm

Not Open Source but I’ve been using https://pushover.net/ for this use case since forever. The website still looks the same as on the day I signed up for it probably more than 10 years ago. Never had an issue and using that in all my scripts or cron jobs.

I had all sorts of nfty notification to ios issues despite lots of trial and error and a bunch of AI tokens. I also moved to pushover.

I can't use it at all except for inconsequential notifications from my laptop (residential IP) or my phone (mobile IP).

What's the advantage over, say, having a Telegram bot push you messages instead of notifications?

The advantage is that I don’t have to use Telegram and Pushover can just be triggered by curl in any scripts I use.

Not nitpicking but I have curl send telegram, it's not bad but I agree pushover looks nice

I have it so it can send email, telegram, or twilio call depending on urgency

Notifications can carry metadata like specific alert sounds or priorities. High priorities will even break through silence modes of your phone.

And you get a nice client with icons for each notification source, can filter by them, etc.

Love this service!

I use it to send commands and URLs between my devices.

On Linux you can do `ntfy sub` and on android you can have Tasker react when a ntfy notification arrives based on its title and contents. So on just about all my devices I have a background script running that is subscribed to a "DeviceCommands" channel that checks if the Title of new messages contains the device hostname or not. If it does it triggers a script based on the contents of the body.

E.g.:

Title: Pixel8

Message: https://kagi.com

Will automatically send the URL to my browser.

Or:

Title: LivingRoomPC

Message: Shutdown

Will shut down the computer.

For people in the iOS / Apple ecosystem, check Hyperduck which is a neat app to do this

Check out Clean Links[1]. It does everything Hyperduck does and more (supports multiple Macs) for free.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of the app.

[1]: https://cleanlinks.app/

I used them for some time but their Android app used to drain my battery fast, so I moved on onto a pay-once use forever app (pushover), that works great on my phone, and that supports all of the features that I need for push notifications

Been running ntfy in my homelab for several years. Always works great!

Incredibly useful to give any app the ability to send you a notification with a single line of code or shell.

Only one minor caveat for self-hosted iOS users - content of the messages come from your server, but the trigger still comes from ntfy.sh server.

You can "install" the PWA on iOS by adding it to your home screen, then your ntfy instance can use APNs directly (via Web Push)!

Very nice. Thank you. I am not super concerned but I know people here tend to be.

Such a great, simple and reliable service. Using it for all sorts of things: nostr push notifications, link sharing between devices, grafana alert notifications.

Love ntfy. I've used it for a lot of things, but probably the most esoteric would be sending a notification from Minecraft via ComputerCraft 1.58 when my BuildCraft Quarry finishes: https://pastebin.com/n2PRwW0E

nearly every MVP of mine adds Ntfy. Its too easy to not add.

I wonder whats the difference between permisions do giant apps like whatsapp, instagram have for notification service.

cause they seem like perfectly integrated themselves into this, while ntfy has to pose itself as battery consuming application

I'm planning to using ntfy for notifications like bitwarden vault backups, if apps are updated.

Probably not permissions so much as proper implementation of push messaging for mobile. Apple created a push message infrastructure and Google followed that allows their messaging infrastructure already running on the phone to multiplex messages for multiple apps without needing additional power for listening.

I use Pushover for email push notifications- it doesn’t have a subscription and using the proper APIs.

What do you mean by "battery consuming application"? At least the PWA of ntfy can use Web Push, which uses your browser's existing push notification service and should not consume any additional battery.

I've been using ntfy for ages. Doesn't chew my battery too much. Chrome, mail and mattermost are my top. Ntfy gets less than 30 notifications per day.

FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging), and Apple's own APN (Apple Push Notifications) work as a single OS level service, and they are multiplexed so that many different apps can route through them with a single connection, even waking your phone/watch from sleep. There are open/de-Googled alternatives like UnifiedPush, but they're not integrated at the OS layer (they run as a background worker thread), and can't match the battery efficiency or sleep-wake capabilities of those built into the OS/low-level networking layer.

If you use ntfy.sh and don't use instant delivery, ntfy uses Google's FCM for delivery, which is what everyone else does. It doesn't require a foreground service and has no battery impact.

ntfy offers you additional options with instant delivery or the selfhostable server. That requires a server connection and does impact battery a little. On my phone it doesn't show up in the list it's so low, but others have reported more consumption

I wrote a mini bridge for Linux desktop notifications (via notify-send) for anyone that's interested:

https://github.com/tim-projects/ntfy-notify-send-bridge

I've been looking for exactly this to run on my Librem 5, Thanks!

I used it for a while. The iOS client had issue showing images (I can’t remember the details, it’s probably fixed by now) and the PWA wasn’t too reliable. I had to frequently login again to get it back in a working state

I ended up switching to pushover and had no issue since

Silly question maybe: why use this at all when you already have a well known, decentralised, vendor-independent, almost real-time, and persistent notification system at your disposal? I'm talking about email of course.

Email notifications are dependent on whatever push notifications your email app are using. Either it's set to reach out and check for new messages at a set interval or use a service like bluemail where you hand over your credentials and they send you a proper push via APNS or Google. Either way not as reliable in my experience.

There used to be pushed.co which was free and pretty good but it seems to have disappeared completely. Does anyone know what happened to them?

interesting

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