NCSCSP is the Centralized Storage Platform — Nextcloud — and its chat side is called Talk. NCSIRMS is the Internal Relayed Messaging System, where “internal” describes the relay rather than the guest list: messages pass through our hardware and stay there, whoever happens to be talking.
There are two chat systems, and which one you’re on depends on who you mostly talk to. Both use your NCSMFA login, so this isn’t about permissions — it’s about which room makes sense for you.
NCSIRMS is at irms.ncsmosiac.com. Most people are here.
Talk is part of NCSCSP, inside Nextcloud at ncscsp.ncsmosiac.com. Family, mostly.
If you’re not sure which you’re on, you’re on whichever one you were put in. Nobody has to pick.
NCSIRMS — the one that replaces text messaging
This is the larger of the two by a wide margin, and it exists for a specific reason: to get conversations off SMS.
Text messaging is a bad system that everyone uses anyway. It’s unencrypted in transit, your carrier keeps a record of who you talked to and when, the spam is relentless and unfixable, and RCS mostly moved the same problems to a different company’s servers. None of that improves by ignoring it.
NCSIRMS is a chat platform running on our hardware, where the conversation stays between the people in it and nobody in the middle is building a profile out of who you message.
Anyone here can invite anyone else, by email. That’s deliberate. You don’t need to ask us, you don’t need to know whether someone has an NCS account, and they don’t need to be family or connected to any of the rest of this. Send an invitation, they make an account, you talk. That’s why this side has the most people on it.
Conversations are organised by topic, not by scroll. This takes a day to get used to and is better forever afterward. Each conversation has a subject line, so following one thread doesn’t mean reading around the other four happening at the same time. If you’ve ever tried to find one useful message in a group text, you already understand the problem it solves.
Talk — the one inside the house
Talk lives inside Nextcloud, as part of NCSCSP. It’s for people who are fully set up on NCS — family, mostly, placed there by us rather than by invitation.
The advantage is that it’s sitting next to your files. Sharing a document into a conversation is one action, because the document and the conversation are already in the same system.
Talk does voice and video calls today. NCSIRMS doesn’t. That’s currently the clearest practical difference between them.
One honest caveat: calls work, and small ones work well, but larger group calls haven’t really been put through their paces yet. If you’re the first to try a four-way video call and it struggles, that’s useful information — tell us rather than assuming it’s your connection.
Why NCSIRMS has no call button
It used to, sort of. The software ships with a video call feature pointed at a public server run by somebody else entirely, and we turned it off on purpose.
Routing your calls through a third party’s infrastructure would undercut the entire reason any of this exists. Better to have no call button than a call button that quietly sends your conversation somewhere we don’t control.
What’s coming instead: a bridge that hands NCSIRMS calls to our own Nextcloud backend, spinning up a disposable session for each individual call and disposing of it afterwards. Nothing persistent, nothing shared between calls, nothing leaving our hardware.
That’s waiting on the high-performance backend being finished and properly tested. Best estimate is somewhere around three months — an estimate, not a date, and the testing half is the part that decides it. Until then, if you need to actually speak to somebody, use Talk or a phone.
Can I have both?
Some people do. It’s handled case by case rather than as a rule, mostly because two chat apps is one more than anyone wants unless there’s a real reason.
If you find yourself needing to pull someone from one side into a conversation on the other, ask and we’ll sort it out. Better than paraphrasing messages between two apps by hand, which is what people otherwise end up doing.
What this is and isn’t
Worth being precise, since NCSIRMS is pitched as an SMS replacement and people may reasonably wonder how far that goes.
Messages aren’t end-to-end encrypted. They’re encrypted in transit and they sit on a server we own rather than a company’s, which is a real and meaningful improvement over text messaging — but it isn’t the same guarantee Signal gives you, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise.
So: better than SMS by a wide margin, and the right tool for ordinary conversation. For something that genuinely must not be readable by anyone but the recipient under any circumstances, use a tool built specifically for that.
Problems
Open a ticket at ncshds.northlandcentral.org, or email support@ncsmx.org.
