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.
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 :)
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)
I think the What's App bridges use the web version in a headless browser. Which means you'll also need to have what's App running on a phone or in a VM.
ps I think this fall's under the DSA, not the DMA.
so... how does that work, i mean the whatspp. i understand if you have to talk to instagram users, you would do something like oath and that would work but how will whatsapp work?
you are giving me some ideas, maybe i can set it up for the family and they can use it to accumulate their contacts on self hosted matrix?
Have you found the bridges reliable? I tried this about 6 months ago and the messenger/instagram bridges would almost never stay connected, which led to many messages not coming though.
this suggests etke which have a $25/onetime to install on your server. this is VERY VERY cheap instead of spending 3 days or whatever. I mean, if the author spent 3 days on this and finished it, that means he/she could do it in much less time next time around.
paying someone literally fixes this issue in a second and $25 is nothing compared to the benefits of selfhosting.
heck, even their monthly $5/month maintenance is extremly cheap if you can't even do that and you are paying for someone's salary also so everyone wins
I think the people on r/selfhosted generally enjoy the process of setting things up, besides running them. To them the time it takes to do it is not a cost, but part of the hobby.
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. It's one of the best maintained project I've seen, a pleasure to install, maintain and upgrade.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
~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).
So I was wondering how the hell they can be that cheap. A bit of research turns up loads of threads like <0> all saying that they oversell capacity and performance will randomly tank whenever they are busy. On the side, loads of complaints about their customer service.
Maybe it would be ok for absolutely non perf critical task. But for a chat app you're probably gonna get loads of problems if it starts to run slow with missed notifications and so on.
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!
If you are in some group chats, file attachments rack up really fast. Several groups I’m in have hit 40,000+ images. Not counting the occasional multi gb zips
Yes, RAM is immediate storage. Disk/SSD is long-term storage.
I would not have asked if I already knew the answer. I only asked again because I did not know the answer. Is that really surprising and offensive behavior? What do you do?
Okay, well, nowadays the word "storage", when used without any additional specificity, is understood to mean the non-volatile kind, and not the computer's main memory. I.e. the I/O device that's used to store files and/or the OS. Perhaps you didn't know this, but the person who first replied to you had no way of knowing that, they simply used a word in common usage in the sense it's usually given. If you were confused by this, you could have said something like
"Well, what do you mean? Volatile or non-volatile storage?"
and someone would have told you what I just told you. Instead you chose to reply as if that person was being a smartass by replying "it's 16 GB of either disk or RAM" (i.e. providing no new information whatsoever).
If you engage with people assuming that they're not being stupid or liars and that they have good reasons to say the things they do, you'll usually have fewer conflicts.
I did not reply as if the person were being a smartass. I replied indicating the answer did not provide me the information I had asked for. The original question was utterly specific, so I asked again for an answer to that.
"Volatile or non-volatile?" means exactly the same as what I asked. Repeating it would not add any more information.
To assume I was calling anybody stupid or a liar is an extremely uncharitable interpretation. The reasonable one is that I did not get an answer to what I asked, exactly as I said.
Maybe you didn't intend to imply that the person was being a smartass, but it was how it came across.
>I replied indicating the answer did not provide me the information I had asked for.
Yes, and that's part of the problem. Part of it is how you phrased it. The "maybe answer that?" is particularly rude; you're being sarcastic to someone who's just helpfully answering an inquiry. But also the problem is that you didn't say "I don't understand what you mean". You said "maybe answer that".
Phrases like "I don't understand what you mean" leave open whether it is you who's missing something or the other person who's saying something nonsensical and just focus on the fact that there's been a failure to communicate and signal that you just want to fix that.
"Maybe answer the question" says that it is definitely not you who's not getting it and puts all the blame on the other person for at the very least not being clear enough.
You are reading enormous hostility into a simple question. I hope you are never treated as badly for your earnest behavior as you think I deserve for mine.
Me? Nah, I don't care. I willingly deal with openly hostile people for laughs. I'm just telling you why you got downvoted. If you want to get a different reaction next time, now you (hopefully) know how to do it. If you don't then just keep doing what you're doing, I guess.
It was a pretty bad question, don’t get all mad when people show you that you’re too lazy to even do the minimum amount of work before asking the question.
I am not "all mad". The article manifestly did not say; if it had, or I already knew, I would not have needed to ask. If it were a "bad question", we would not still be talking about how it could have been answered informatively. It was, in fact, a very specific question, with zero space for misunderstanding.
But the reply did not offer any information at all, so I asked for clarification.
Downvoting people for asking for clarification (-4 already!) is just spiteful. It would have been less work for everybody to answer the question that was asked, the second time if not the first.
That appears to be space on disk for transcripts of all the traffic.
Presumably if people were not uploading GB of crap, it would not need to archive GB of crap.
Unless it keeps as many copies of everything as people who get it. That would be dumb.
But I was told that is what Gmail does. Every GIF animation, cat video, and corrupted SPAM jpg attached is stored as many millions of times as people who saw it, and probably as many again as forwarded it.
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.
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
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/
I'm a Matrix fan but this post does not really make a ton of sense.