Zusam
From the German "zusammen," together: Zusam is a private social space for a group of friends -
a self-hosted alternative to the family WhatsApp group or the friends Facebook group, with no
ads, algorithms, or data harvesting in between. The AGPLv3 project is deliberately modest in
scope and stack: a Symfony PHP backend exposing a REST API over SQLite, with a lightweight
Preact single-page frontend, designed for a low server footprint that runs comfortably on
small hardware. Groups post messages into shared feeds that handle real life well: video and
image uploads (with FFmpeg processing), photo albums for trips and events, and rich link
previews with inline embeds for YouTube, Vimeo, Imgur, SoundCloud, Twitch, and Bandcamp - so
sharing a song or a clip looks the way it should. When something needs to leave the circle,
public link generation exposes a single message to non-members without opening the group. The
interface is fully responsive and mobile-friendly, targeting Firefox ESR and recent Chrome. It
is the small-web answer to a real question: where does a group chat's shared history live when
you want it owned by the group instead of a platform?
Deploy