Some years ago, I hosted my own matrix server for a few months. I’m an experienced self-hoster, but I remeber that Matrix was paticularly hard to host, requiring weird proxy rules, DNS adjustments, federation never worked reliably and push notifications never worked at all. I ditched the project soon because I also had no real use for it. However, I recently had some ideas where a Matrix server would be useful again. Has anyone attempted to install it recently and can tell me whether the situation has improved? Also, which server do you recommend? There still is synapse but I found it paticularly complicated to host. Dendrite is now archived and the current fork seems to be tuwunel which doesn’t seem to be under very active development.
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matthew the ceo addressed aot of the criticisms recently, check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyuqM7RbX5E
transcript with links: https://gist.github.com/ara4n/190ad712965d0f06e17f508d1a45b554
other than that, push notifications work fine for me with Ntfy. but as I heard matrix.org hs users have problems, possibly because of serverside firewall issues, investigation is stuck somehow
I believe the machines are currently struggling against the humans
Damn. That sucks. (Edit: Referring to the comments saying Matrix is dead and dying.)
I get that IRC and XMPP are more stable and built around federation from the ground up, but… they’re not Discord replacements.
That was IMHO, the point of Matrix/Element.
Tell me if I’m wrong, but a significant part of a network’s resilience is the number of nodes and users.
Without a glowup or some kind of repackaging, IRC/XMPP are doomed to stay niche.
I had the same experience as OP when I tried Matrix a few years ago. No hate on it but it was not easy and I gave up because I already had a simple IRC setup that’s working for me and my friends.
Some IRC clients are now web based and it’s been enough to keep a few of my friends there instead of Discord. We use The Lounge. It can keep a history, display images, videos, play mp3s, and show previews of most URLs. Like, we can simply copy/paste images into a channel and they are uploaded on the server and displayed in the chat. There’s also push notifications and it’s mobile friendly.
Convos also does something like this. Apparently it can also do video chat but I’ve never got it to work.
I’ve recently been thinking about giving Matrix another try but I’m pretty sure my friends are going to stay on “modern” IRC anyway.
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 itIRC and XMPP are infinitely less painful, honestly, and both were designed around federation from the ground up, long before it was cool.
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.
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.
Agree, AFAIC it’s only good at bridging protocols. Most likely an ecosystem advantage more than a protocol one.
I switched from IRC to matrix in 2018 specifically because I found mobile difficult.
I used the suggestion in your linked document by running irssi in a tmux session on a VPS I paid for, then using a bridge to an app on my phone. I found the experience to be cumbersome even for someone like myself (and even then irssi required reboots or else it would lose performance over time).
I wanted to use IRC for a family chat, but I couldn’t possibly convince my friends and family to go through the same client setup as I did.
In my opinion there are use cases that either IRC or Matrix would be preferred over the other (not to mention other self hosted communication software).
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.
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 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.
I use conduit. And really happy with it. Since I use 3 bridges the compose.yml is a mess. It works really nice. The sliding feature boosts all media files. But there is always something broken or misconfigured. Actually my WhatsApp bridge blocks all mediafiles and I was too busy to fix it already.
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.
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.
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…
