Matrix has one caveat: it synchronizes every room (group chat) from another instance to your instance fully- which one user subscribed to on your instance. Because of this the instance-systems/servers are under heavy load for private userage (not controllable number of users and chats). Many governmental institutions (controllable number of users and chats) use though, because in case of "disasters/incidents" the data is not lost but saved all over all replicas.
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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So if I only run one Matrix/Synapse instance for my private group, does any of the matrix decentalized technology effect me? I would only have one instance, and my users will probably only be connected to my instance. Though if I'm understanding correctly, it sounds like if I subscribed to another instance, all of the chat communication on that entire instance is copied to my server as well? Does this include files? Sounds like it would use a lot of extra disk space.
Sort of. I host a Matrix Synapse server for about 15 friends. Some of them use rooms on the big Matrix.org server as well, some bridge to Discord and Facebook, and some chat with other smaller groups. By default, Synapse won't sync rooms you haven't joined. It also won't copy files - it'll fetch those I believe (although maybe it'll keep a few days worth of files around?).
After about 5 years of hosting it, we're sitting at 90GB total disc space used, of which ~70GB is the database. You can compress the database and save lots of disc space (50%+) but I haven't gotten around to that yet.
I see why they recommend not using SQLite lol.
As a protective measure, you could block your local synapse server from federating with matrix.org and that should keep anybody from joining any of the giant rooms on the largest matrix server.
It would replicate this one specific group/chat only - from the moment of subscription. Depending on the load it can get heavy on your instance.
Do you know if this happens the other way around? A user chats with a different server and that chat is synced to my server. Can I use federation without allowing others to join mine outside my group? Because otherwise, it sounds like my server's data will be copied to a different server.
I run ejabberd for myself and my family/friend and use conversations on android. Mattermost I would say is the most like discord. I run one of those as well and love it.
Prosody here in addition to Matrix. :)
Yes. Never used it, but they all do the same thing.
I think ejabberd or another other xmpp server would have been my first choice for a service like this by a long shot. If only we had some good iOS clients to go to. While I'm on android, most of the family and some of the friends use iOS, so it was kind of a non-starter from that alone.
Edit: log -> long
Yeah unfortunately iOS is very stingy with battery. Thankfully there's a few apps that use apples push and ejabberd supports it. I haven't tested them in a while tho since I'm on android.
Mattermost is great and I'm pretty sure they have an iOS app. I don't believe the messages are encrypted on MM, but if you're running the infra it's not too big of a deal IMHO.
Mumble in combination with XMPP is the most hassle free and low resource option. Just for small personal use snikket.org XMPP is probably the best.
Matrix Synapse also works, but if you join any large rooms it will blow up ram and storage space usage, thus I can't really recommend it.
My partner and I self-host a matrix server + element frontend locally, and we are both in a few federated chats with people and organizations elsewhere.
We mostly stood it up to replace a discord server that we were using for communication, organization, and home automation in anticipation of API/policy changes on Discord's end. For that application it has worked really well and it's a lot easier to integrate with software that spams log or alert data.
I run a single user matrix instance to join some chat rooms. Works great for me.
There was a post recently about this. It was called revolt
Yeah, revolt looks nice and is clearly trying to be a drop in replacement for discord, so that will make adoption easier.
However it doesn't seem ready yet. The client notes that their voice chat feature is in the middle of being re-written from scratch. The legacy voice chat just doesn't work for me (on Linux). Discord isn't great on Linux, but it's more usable that revolt right now.
Also, for better or worse, it's not actually federated, it's just open source. So there is a central revolt server that new users automatically use, and if you want to operate elsewhere, as far as I can tell, you effectively modify the client to reference a different server.
I'm running a mumble and a conduit server currently, and I'm not planning to ever touch shitcord again ^^
To echo what others have said, I’ve been running a personal/friends only matrix server for about a year, and have found it, though difficult at first, to be stable enough to use as a universal messenger combining discord, messenger, WhatsApp and others in one app. It’s very convenient.
I run a non-federated Matrix server for my family with synapse, it's behind nginx and the setup is pretty straightforward if you know what you're doing. It does chat, voice, and video with screenshare nicely, though I don't know now well it scales to a large group.
I've been running a synapse server for a few years using https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
I'd highly recommend the above Ansible playbook as it makes it easy to manage not only synapse but also to manage a bunch of bridges and bots if you have the need for them. I have a bunch of rooms that are bridged to Slack for my bozo friends that refuse to use a cool open-source alternative.
For Matrix, I'd recommend conduit over synapse, with the expectation that all of synapse's features haven't yet been added (most notably support for spaces, which may or may not be a dealbreaker).
It's incredibly easy to set-up and very lightweight. I never self-hosted synapse due to how resource-heavy it is, and constantly had issues with dendrite racking up resources as well.conduit has honestly been the easiest thing I've self-hosted.
What front-end are you running with conduit? I just spent two hours trying to get element to talk to it but i've put it off due to so much failure with it.
There's a couple I use: element (desktop & mobile), gomuks, nheko, and fluffychat.
I'm assuming you followed the deploy walkthrough? That should work pretty well on its own, but there might be some weird networking issues you could be having. First try running conduit once set up in the foreground to make sure it starts without issue, then try the health check listed in the instructions:
$ curl https://your.server.name/_matrix/client/versions
# If using port 8448
$ curl https://your.server.name:8448/_matrix/client/versions
If it fails here, I'd recommend stopping by their matrix room with another account. The room is active and helpful; I greatly appreciated the help I got in setting up my homeserver with a subdomain + pretty homeserver name i.e. without the subdomain. As conduit is still early in development it'd probably be good to have a backup account on matrix.org or another smaller homeserver (preferably the latter given how overloaded the former is).
It's not too bad. I host for me and my wife with a few bridges and synapse and postgres together use less than 500MB of RAM. That is not too bad.
I personally prefer a self - hosted Revolt instance. It's not federated or anything, but it's fast and nearly identical to Discord with some extra nice features, and it has a first party docker container so it's extremely easy to set up. I didn't go with Matrix or anything like that because it's harder to set up a natural system where you have a server, but then that server has many channels, and that's very important to how my friend group communicates and hangs out.
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Just found out about this recently. It's touted as an open source alternative.
Revolt Chat
I set up an instance a while ago and it's pretty neat. I'm not at the stage of asking my users to switch yet, for our small instance discord is still fine for me, and in that time hopefully revolt can get more feature parity
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I've been hosting it for myself for a couple of years and once you set it up it's without problems. I wanted to consolidate all my chats like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc. into one UI and the bridges allow me to do that.
Discord has a proprietary license so I never considered it.
Sounds really interesting! Could you please indicate what are you selfhosting exactly in order to achieve this?
- For the server I use synapse and I use their deb package so it upgrades itself with the whole system when I do a
apt upgrade - For the bridges there are different solutions, most of them can be found here https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/setup.html (<- the onel written in go) and https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/python/setup.html (the ones written in python)
- Some bridges you don't need to host yourself because there are some public ones available via the Element UI
But remember that bridges terminate end to end encryption and there are some pitfalls with that. For some background info you can watch a video I made some time ago: https://tube.jeena.net/w/rYhp4ZT5Ykw1aBGqMr62KG
Thanks a lot for the reply @[email protected], much appreciated. I'm watching the video right now, thanks for sharing your personal experience on hosting the services and the security considerations, good to know! I was between happy and surprised to see that the video is on PeerTube, way to go, thanks for promoting the Fediverse. 👍
Not 100% sure if I want to go through this hole now 🤣
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I use Matrix too. I've hosted my own Synapse instance for almost a year now. It works great. Easy to maintain and upgrade.
Yeah, I'm hosting a Synapse instance; have been for a few years now. The biggest complication was the reverse proxy set-up, because I didn't want matrix in my handle. 😁 But they've got great docs around that (and more) these days; and there's a good community in the Synapse Admins room too.
I have been successfully hosting a Matrix instance (Synapse) for a few friends since January. Definitely a learning process but I have to say the docs are excellent. Reverse proxy and federation was a little bit tricky but has been working fine. I've also since migrated from a bare metal setup to a containerized one with very little hassle beyond understanding the basics of migrating the database, etc.
I do. I've been hosting it for 3 years now. I have seen them add new features rapidly, and it's pretty exciting, things can (rarely) break sometimes (cause you didn't read the upgrade notes before upgrading).
They had something called communities, which they scrapped for Spaces. Spaces are more akin to a server on Discord for the most part. I don't use Discord too much, so there could be some features missing that I have not noticed.
I didn't intend to bring them to me, I intended to go to them using bridges. If you have a Discord server, investigate how to bridge to that discord server (either personally via double puppeting bridges or maintain a complete copy of the server using relay bridges). This way over time you can bring people over to your matrix instance cause these companies do mess up (at this point its not will its when). Similar with signal, googlechat etc.
It is fun and fairly easy.
There is Spacebar (formerly Fosscord) aiming to be a drop-in discord-compatible replacement. I'm not sure how usuable it is yet, since I haven't gotten around to try it, but it does look like a promising solution imo.
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I have two synapse servers and jitsi instance with 3 bridges. Works fine for home and Corp usage.
I would like to find an alternative as well . I mostly use one discord sever that the users would be happy to switch to a self hosted option.
Not sure if they do screen sharing but I've seen some buzz around 'revolt' recently which is self-hostable.
Check out rocket.chat
It is what my company uses. It is free and open source. Same features as Discord. Not too difficult to setup.
According to TS devs the screen sharing is comming Soon™ for TS5 but I can't promise it because it was originally planned for last year.
If you want a source I can search for it in german ts beta chat.
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I've had a private Matrix server for me and a few family members for years now. It doesn't federate, and I'm afraid to try, because I run it on a potato computer and I've heard horror stories of Synapse federation consuming hundreds of gigabytes of space.
It's generally been stable and performant and really nice to use. The only problem is encryption: Element seems to forget keys sometimes and need to resync. And Matrix's whole e2ee system is arcane nonsense to anyone who's not extremely technical. Every time that happens, it's a long tech support call.
The solution is to just not use encryption on chatrooms, which is fine, but DMs have to be encrypted so it still comes up sometimes.
So long as your users are not in a bunch of media heavy rooms, the storage usage is not bad When federated. I've got mine on a 2 core, 4GB VPS with 80GB of storage. 6 users, 2 active. I've been sitting at about 40% storage used for the last year. Just make sure you've set reasonable retention policies.
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