7 ms·

Matrix was worth the effort to self host

88 points by anthropodie 4y ago

jagermo 4y ago
I'm thinking of setting up a Matrix instance for my kids and their friends to chat. However, Synapse might be a bit of overkill, I don't need (actually want) things like federation. I saw Conduit (conduit.rs) a few months ago, does anyone have experience with using it for a small community?
- Arathorn 4y ago
  Conduit is beta, but probably works quite well in an unfederated environment. That said, these days Synapse is also lightweight in an unfederated environment while also being production grade, and it’s easy to turn off federation. Were it me, i’d grab Synapse and be done with it, so as to avoid playing dodge with any beta issues.
  - jagermo 4y ago
    yeah, you are probably right.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Probably better to use Dendrite matrix for that. That one is pretty close to fully working and uses less resources.
  - jagermo 4y ago
    I'll look into it.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Synapse is very lightweight now. I recommend using it because it gets the latest features as they are released, like VOIP calls instead of crappy Jitsi, etc. Matrix is still heavily under development, so you want to be using the reference/most active implementation of the protocol. You can stop federation too.
- IceWreck 4y ago
  Haven't used conduit in a while but Dendrite (written in Go) has most features that you would need. Well conduit does too but last time I checked them out they were switching databases again.
- themoonisachees 4y ago
  There's a really well-made ansible playbook that deploys synapse and pretty much anything you would ever want for you, highly recommend it
- cameronhowe 4y ago
  I swapped to caddy + conduit after running traefik + synapse in a docker container. Not having to deal with postgres db upgrades and docker is nice. It is a little bit buggier because clients dont always adhere to the spec. I'm sticking with conduit, but I wouldn't recommend it yet unless every user is ok with random bugs. edit: I should say I've run conduit for a few months and before that we used synapse for maybe 2 years
- yaky 4y ago
  If you are not adamant on using the Matrix protocol, Snikket (XMPP) is very easy to set up. Server runs in a docker container with auto-renewing certificates, has an invite/create account page and an admin console.
- faisalhackshah 4y ago
  This is my exact use case. I disabled federation, hand out account tokens to my kids' friends so they can make their own accounts (public registration is disabled). I used that popular Synapse Ansible deploy project, and deployed it on the cheapest Hetzner VPS. Been running flawlessly for over a year now.
wink 4y ago
"was worth the effort" after three days of use. eyeroll. I'm a Matrix fan but this post does not really make a ton of sense.
- mcluck 4y ago
  Agreed. I went through the effort of setting it up back when Synapse was the only option. It was cool and my technical friends had some fun tinkering with it but after a couple of weeks we found we weren't using it as our primary communication system and stepped away from it. I know that the new server system is better and Element has improved a lot but, speaking from experience, a weekend is not enough time to say that it was worth the effort.
  - blacklight 4y ago
    I've been using Synapse as my only messaging service, and Element as my only messaging frontend/app, for months by now. If you self-host it, then the next logical step is to install bridges for all the protocols you currently use (WhatsApp, Messanger, Instagram, Telegram, LinkedIn...). Or, at least, that's been the main reason for me to install it, as I was getting tired of the lack of developments on the bitlbee/libpurple side. And, since the API is open and we'll documented, it's also become my central hub for automated notifications, RSS feeds, social feeds etc. So Matrix is now my "one app to rule them all". I've got a channel on my server dedicated to the FLOSS project I maintain, and a couple of people are there, but that's not the point - at least not for me. I use Matrix because of its flexibility and ability to bridge anything to anything else. Who cares if there aren't enough people on my server :)
    - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
      please help me understand "whatsapp bridge", does it work like a the telegram bot where you DONT need a telegram account to bridge to a room/person, they can just message you directly or like a front-end for your existing whatsapp account? like a proxy of sorts? instead of having multiple apps, you still have multiple accounts but a single app? i can't wait enough for EU's DMA to be enforced so that i can finally talk to "whatsapp" without having a whatsapp account ( i currently don't so losing out on that)
ncmncm 4y ago
It says using ~15GB? already. But doesn't say RAM or disk. That seems to matter.
- blfr 4y ago
  Storage. Which to be fair is nothing for a modern server but still seems like a lot for a chat app.
  - johnchristopher 4y ago
    ~15Gb is out of the small VPS territory, especially if you want to use for something else (talking from experience, Matrix will eat space to store avatars and CPU cycles to do its thing ; which is fine, just not maybe compatible with the cheapest VPS out there).
    - curiousgal 4y ago
      Check out Contaboo. Monthly Base Price £5.99 4 vCPU Cores 8 GB RAM 50 GB NVMe or 200 GB SSD 32 TB Traffic out / Unlimited Incoming
      - mxuribe 4y ago
        I'm often on the lookout for good, but decently priced VPS providers (been slowly trying to move away from digital ocean)....but never heard of Contabo. That's really great pricing; especially since as i recall running synapse does require a bit of RAM! Thanks for sharing!
        miyuru 4y ago
        You might find lowendtalk.com and lowendspirit.com forums helpful.
        mxuribe 4y ago
        Will do; thanks for this tip @miyuru!
blfr 4y ago
I'm on the lookout for things to host on my personal server but what is benefit here? Is there some great first hand content available in these Matrix groups?
- jagermo 4y ago
  For me, the bridges are a killer feature. I bridged Signal and Whatsapp via Element One, and it is great to not have to install those apps (well, mostly Whatsapp) on my smartphone. I dove a little into the matrix groups, it brought back some memories to IRC way, way back, but I'm not using it extensively. But the bridges, they are awesome.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    The bridges are 90% good but I find they fail enough that I check the actual app to see if things worked. Stuff like minute long lag, messages arriving out of order, images on telegram being sent as the uncompressed thumbnail ones instead of inline images
geekuillaume 4y ago
If you want to quickly deploy Matrix (and all the related goodies) on your server,I highly recommend https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy. It's one of the best maintained project I've seen, a pleasure to install, maintain and upgrade.
- themoonisachees 4y ago
  Seconded, was a breeze. The docs can appear unclear but if you do exactly what is there it works like a charm.
bravura 4y ago
How difficult is it to write a matrix-bridge? In particular, Upwork's chat is complete garbage, but the Upwork message API is only available to enterprise clients. Eric Migicovsky, founder of Beeper, suggested to build off an existing puppeteer bridge, and shared the following links as starting points: https://mau.dev/tulir/mautrix-amp/ https://mau.dev/tulir/mautrix-amp/ https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-puppeteer-line/ https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-puppeteer-line/
- Arathorn 4y ago
  It should be pretty simple. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/blob/develop/HOWTO.md https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/blob/... is a simple Slack bridge in 100 LOC, for instance.
  - bravura 4y ago
    Slack has an API, and thus does not require screen scraping.
fimdomeio 4y ago
I self host matrix-synapse for a year or something. I tried dentrite and there was still no way to receive notifications on the phone. I don't know what's the current status but I feel it's a show stopper for a lot of people.
- Arathorn 4y ago
  Dendrite landed push back in March: https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/pull/1842 https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/pull/1842 Agreed it was a huge omission a year ago.
cutierust 4y ago
On that note,is there a not self hosted but reasonably popular chat service that i don't know of where i can give people my username a la discord and have them chat with me? I cannot continue to use discord in good conscience
- djbusby 4y ago
  Mattermost?
- driminicus 4y ago
  Closest thing would be either XMPP or matrix. Whether either of these is good enough for your usecase is up to you.
- mxuribe 4y ago
  Others have noted altertnatives like mattermost, etc....But if still interested in matrix, you can always pay for providers to host it for you (and of course manage everything related to infrastructure, etc.)...plus, some charge a tiny bit more per each bridge to connect your account to discord, Telegrma, etc. In essence, you have a single account - through a paid matrix provider - but can interact with your friends on other networks. See: https://matrix.org/hosting/ https://matrix.org/hosting/
unboxingelf 4y ago
I self hosted matrix-synapse and riot (now element) for a year or more. The resource utilization of synapse was rough on my cheap vps. Upgrading to dendrite and maintaining state seemed challenging. Eventually the server fell over and I didn’t feel like trying to rebuild everything. I’m all for pluggable SOA architectures at work, but for personal use I’d prefer something turnkey.
- zaik 4y ago
  You could try hosting Snikket or Prosody, which gives you federated, E2E encrypted chat at a fraction of resource consumption.
Melatonic 4y ago
Trillian is back?

88 points by anthropodie 4y ago

I'm thinking of setting up a Matrix instance for my kids and their friends to chat. However, Synapse might be a bit of overkill, I don't need (actually want) things like federation. I saw Conduit (conduit.rs) a few months ago, does anyone have experience with using it for a small community?

Arathorn 4y ago
Conduit is beta, but probably works quite well in an unfederated environment. That said, these days Synapse is also lightweight in an unfederated environment while also being production grade, and it’s easy to turn off federation. Were it me, i’d grab Synapse and be done with it, so as to avoid playing dodge with any beta issues.
- jagermo 4y ago
  yeah, you are probably right.
panick21_ 4y ago
Probably better to use Dendrite matrix for that. That one is pretty close to fully working and uses less resources.
- jagermo 4y ago
  I'll look into it.
jacooper 4y ago
Synapse is very lightweight now. I recommend using it because it gets the latest features as they are released, like VOIP calls instead of crappy Jitsi, etc. Matrix is still heavily under development, so you want to be using the reference/most active implementation of the protocol. You can stop federation too.
IceWreck 4y ago
Haven't used conduit in a while but Dendrite (written in Go) has most features that you would need. Well conduit does too but last time I checked them out they were switching databases again.
themoonisachees 4y ago
There's a really well-made ansible playbook that deploys synapse and pretty much anything you would ever want for you, highly recommend it
cameronhowe 4y ago
I swapped to caddy + conduit after running traefik + synapse in a docker container. Not having to deal with postgres db upgrades and docker is nice. It is a little bit buggier because clients dont always adhere to the spec. I'm sticking with conduit, but I wouldn't recommend it yet unless every user is ok with random bugs. edit: I should say I've run conduit for a few months and before that we used synapse for maybe 2 years
yaky 4y ago
If you are not adamant on using the Matrix protocol, Snikket (XMPP) is very easy to set up. Server runs in a docker container with auto-renewing certificates, has an invite/create account page and an admin console.
faisalhackshah 4y ago
This is my exact use case. I disabled federation, hand out account tokens to my kids' friends so they can make their own accounts (public registration is disabled). I used that popular Synapse Ansible deploy project, and deployed it on the cheapest Hetzner VPS. Been running flawlessly for over a year now.

wink 4y ago

"was worth the effort" after three days of use. eyeroll. I'm a Matrix fan but this post does not really make a ton of sense.

mcluck 4y ago
Agreed. I went through the effort of setting it up back when Synapse was the only option. It was cool and my technical friends had some fun tinkering with it but after a couple of weeks we found we weren't using it as our primary communication system and stepped away from it. I know that the new server system is better and Element has improved a lot but, speaking from experience, a weekend is not enough time to say that it was worth the effort.
- blacklight 4y ago
  I've been using Synapse as my only messaging service, and Element as my only messaging frontend/app, for months by now. If you self-host it, then the next logical step is to install bridges for all the protocols you currently use (WhatsApp, Messanger, Instagram, Telegram, LinkedIn...). Or, at least, that's been the main reason for me to install it, as I was getting tired of the lack of developments on the bitlbee/libpurple side. And, since the API is open and we'll documented, it's also become my central hub for automated notifications, RSS feeds, social feeds etc. So Matrix is now my "one app to rule them all". I've got a channel on my server dedicated to the FLOSS project I maintain, and a couple of people are there, but that's not the point - at least not for me. I use Matrix because of its flexibility and ability to bridge anything to anything else. Who cares if there aren't enough people on my server :)
  - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
    please help me understand "whatsapp bridge", does it work like a the telegram bot where you DONT need a telegram account to bridge to a room/person, they can just message you directly or like a front-end for your existing whatsapp account? like a proxy of sorts? instead of having multiple apps, you still have multiple accounts but a single app? i can't wait enough for EU's DMA to be enforced so that i can finally talk to "whatsapp" without having a whatsapp account ( i currently don't so losing out on that)

ncmncm 4y ago

It says using ~15GB? already. But doesn't say RAM or disk. That seems to matter.

blfr 4y ago
Storage. Which to be fair is nothing for a modern server but still seems like a lot for a chat app.
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  ~15Gb is out of the small VPS territory, especially if you want to use for something else (talking from experience, Matrix will eat space to store avatars and CPU cycles to do its thing ; which is fine, just not maybe compatible with the cheapest VPS out there).
  - curiousgal 4y ago
    Check out Contaboo. Monthly Base Price £5.99 4 vCPU Cores 8 GB RAM 50 GB NVMe or 200 GB SSD 32 TB Traffic out / Unlimited Incoming
    - mxuribe 4y ago
      I'm often on the lookout for good, but decently priced VPS providers (been slowly trying to move away from digital ocean)....but never heard of Contabo. That's really great pricing; especially since as i recall running synapse does require a bit of RAM! Thanks for sharing!
      - miyuru 4y ago
        You might find lowendtalk.com and lowendspirit.com forums helpful.
        mxuribe 4y ago
        Will do; thanks for this tip @miyuru!

blfr 4y ago

I'm on the lookout for things to host on my personal server but what is benefit here? Is there some great first hand content available in these Matrix groups?

jagermo 4y ago
For me, the bridges are a killer feature. I bridged Signal and Whatsapp via Element One, and it is great to not have to install those apps (well, mostly Whatsapp) on my smartphone. I dove a little into the matrix groups, it brought back some memories to IRC way, way back, but I'm not using it extensively. But the bridges, they are awesome.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  The bridges are 90% good but I find they fail enough that I check the actual app to see if things worked. Stuff like minute long lag, messages arriving out of order, images on telegram being sent as the uncompressed thumbnail ones instead of inline images

geekuillaume 4y ago

If you want to quickly deploy Matrix (and all the related goodies) on your server,I highly recommend https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy. It's one of the best maintained project I've seen, a pleasure to install, maintain and upgrade.

themoonisachees 4y ago
Seconded, was a breeze. The docs can appear unclear but if you do exactly what is there it works like a charm.

bravura 4y ago

How difficult is it to write a matrix-bridge? In particular, Upwork's chat is complete garbage, but the Upwork message API is only available to enterprise clients. Eric Migicovsky, founder of Beeper, suggested to build off an existing puppeteer bridge, and shared the following links as starting points: https://mau.dev/tulir/mautrix-amp/ https://mau.dev/tulir/mautrix-amp/ https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-puppeteer-line/ https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-puppeteer-line/

Arathorn 4y ago
It should be pretty simple. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/blob/develop/HOWTO.md https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/blob/... is a simple Slack bridge in 100 LOC, for instance.
- bravura 4y ago
  Slack has an API, and thus does not require screen scraping.

fimdomeio 4y ago

I self host matrix-synapse for a year or something. I tried dentrite and there was still no way to receive notifications on the phone. I don't know what's the current status but I feel it's a show stopper for a lot of people.

Arathorn 4y ago
Dendrite landed push back in March: https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/pull/1842 https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/pull/1842 Agreed it was a huge omission a year ago.

cutierust 4y ago

On that note,is there a not self hosted but reasonably popular chat service that i don't know of where i can give people my username a la discord and have them chat with me? I cannot continue to use discord in good conscience

djbusby 4y ago
Mattermost?
driminicus 4y ago
Closest thing would be either XMPP or matrix. Whether either of these is good enough for your usecase is up to you.
mxuribe 4y ago
Others have noted altertnatives like mattermost, etc....But if still interested in matrix, you can always pay for providers to host it for you (and of course manage everything related to infrastructure, etc.)...plus, some charge a tiny bit more per each bridge to connect your account to discord, Telegrma, etc. In essence, you have a single account - through a paid matrix provider - but can interact with your friends on other networks. See: https://matrix.org/hosting/ https://matrix.org/hosting/

unboxingelf 4y ago

I self hosted matrix-synapse and riot (now element) for a year or more. The resource utilization of synapse was rough on my cheap vps. Upgrading to dendrite and maintaining state seemed challenging. Eventually the server fell over and I didn’t feel like trying to rebuild everything. I’m all for pluggable SOA architectures at work, but for personal use I’d prefer something turnkey.

zaik 4y ago
You could try hosting Snikket or Prosody, which gives you federated, E2E encrypted chat at a fraction of resource consumption.

Melatonic 4y ago

Trillian is back?