Selfhosted

damn, was not expecting to see so much hate towards matrix.
it sure was annoying to set up, but once I got it up the way I wanted, it kind of just worked from that moment on. I’ve had it for some 5 months now and it works as intended with no issues, aside from some small glitches here and there which get fixed very fast (on the mobile app).
my use case was getting off Discord with a bunch of friends, so we needed a reliable way to have multiple chats, channels/rooms and good voice chat with screen sharing. element call does those well. my federation is of course also closed. for me e2ee is just a bonus
I think that if that’s your use case, it’s good for that. synapse does seem a bit inefficient but I guess you can’t do much about it

It's still bad, and the foundation keeps digging itself into a deeper and deeper hole. Dead project.

IRC and XMPP are infinitely less painful, honestly, and both were designed around federation from the ground up, long before it was cool.

Matrix works good. Two years ago Element should've been what element Next is today. But it is getting there. It still has great backers and lots of users. As long as there is no direct alternative, it'll get there.

I don't want american companies owning all my data and neither do companies want that.

It's not the shiny new kid anymore but there is no other new shiny kid. Hence, it is still the brightest and newest kid.

I set it up during the outage last week.

Easy enough to just pull in the synapse docker container and run it on my home server. I wireguard it to my VPS that acts as a reverse proxy.

Both federation and push notifications work.

If you want a conduwuit sucessor, I'd choose the continuwuity project over tuwunel. The legitimacy as the sucessor is mainly self-proclaimed, and continuwuity is a community effort. The entire thing is kind of a shitshow, though. If you want to do it like 99% of people, make friends with Synapse.

I think what you describe still holds true. You need a few correct DNS entries and an open port. Once you want VoIP, some more ports and a TURN server will be necessary. And that one took me some effort, but the server itself (including federation) was well within my comfort zone. And I run continuwuity these days because Synapse wastes way too much resources for what I do and their other efforts went nowhere. But I'm not sure about the future of those smaller Matrix server projects.

And if you don't like Matrix or can't get it to run, maybe try something like XMPP.

Way back in 2023, Matrix was the jack of all trades but the master of none. It wanted to replace Discord but the video messaging was not stable enough. It wanted to replace Slack but message searching didn't really work. It was still struggling to get a decent client and server implementation, and message loading times were a huge pain point.

Fast forward to today, most of the problems are still there. Give it a couple more years to cook.

https://hanez.org/document/why-matrix-sucks/

Use IRC.

I didn't like synapse or dendrite at all, but conduit has been great.

It's been a solid tool for hosting just for myself to bridge all the different platforms/protocols that people want to talk to me using, but there is no way I would recommend it to anyone else. I don't know if it will ever get to a point where it works well enough for me to recommend. If you do want to host a server though, I strongly recommend matrix docker ansible deploy to do so.

My matrix server is nearing 5 years old. I have federation disabled, because I don't need that - we are using it as a family chat. sqlite database I'm using is now 2GB, but other than that it is working great.

I do acknowledge that I'm not leveraging the things matrix is designed for (federation, e2e encryption), but to be honest, it's not really good at that.

I installed synapse some weeks ago. Pretty easy, straightforward. Even managed to install some bridges.

After the last matrix.org incident and some info about the failing message retention, I just killed the server again. I'm not comfy with the service being so greedy/resource hungry and also the usability sucks at certain points.

Tbh I had no issues with synapse.

The problems that persist: Very rare issues with decrypting (as I rarely encounter it, while being in encrypted chats with 150+ users, it's not an issue for me), apart from after you changed clients, slow image loading (a bit annoying, but ok if you multitask anyway) and clients all having different feature sets (some of which you can also hackily make work in others).

I have synapse server running in docker on a VPS and it's been pretty reliable. At my office I use it as sort of a self-hosted Slack replacement. For our use case, I don't have federation enabled, so no experience on that front. It's a small office and everyone here uses either Element or FuzzyChat on desktop and mobile. It runs behind an nginx reverse proxy and I've got SSO set up with Authentik and that's worked very well. Happy to share some configs if that would be useful.

I use https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy which makes it pretty painless to self host on a vpc with Synapse as the server.

I don't have federation setup, since I just use it with friends. So besides running the update command once a week, I don't even think about maintaince.

I recently shut down my server because it's a high traffic, high risk software. You should have an eye on it, I'd say at least half an hour every week...

I host synapse as docker container behind traefik and it works pretty well. I have two users on my instance, have setup the mautrix-whatsapp bridge and federate with the instance of a friend.

The setup was straight forward: Pointing the sub-domain via traefik to the service and in the homeserver.yml enable well-known which announce port https with port 443 instead of 8448.

As the end use my biggest gripe with Matrix is with voice communications, it’s almost as if you sneeze wrong you’ll lose connection to the voice group, screen sharing is horrible, no audio and the window is not adjustable, cant even make it full screen.

Now they’re reducing people’s usage by putting in a subscription and locking certain features, at least on the home server.

While I am disappointed they did at least take my advice and prevent Windows Recall from capturing people’s messages.