I’ve hosted a personal Matrix server (Dendrite) and web client (Element) for the last six months, with unhappy results. In practice an entirely self‐hosted Matr

I’ve hosted a personal Matrix server (Dendrite) and web client (Element) for the last six months, with unhappy results. In practice an entirely self‐hosted Matrix stack seems to be kind of unreliable for me. Having joined just a couple of large rooms—open source project chats that migrated from IRC after the Freenode debacle—sync on login never seems to work right, either getting stuck on a loading animation, or loading messages out of order (“Friday” followed by “Today” followed by January followed by “Yesterday” followed by “Today”). The room history seems to have corrupted itself somehow, according to the logs, but I have no idea how attempt a resync from scratch besides wiping and reinitializing the whole PostgreSQL database. And from the beginning, the client randomly disconnects from the server, but when I refresh it’s connected again. I’m no stranger to self‐hosting, and I personally run my own email server (with MTA‐STS, DANE, and mandatory TLS for outgoing mail) and Mumble for voice chat, and even Pleroma. These have all been very reliable, enough that I regularly communicate with friends this way. In contrast, my Matrix experience makes me reluctant to suggest it to anyone I know, because it’s hard enough to get anyone onto something user‐friendly like Signal. I want to love Matrix. The idea is really cool, there is obviously a lot of work behind it, and I appreciate having something federated to compete with Signal’s model. But it just hasn’t worked for me. I hope the self‐hosted situation will improve.