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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Way back in 2023, Matrix was the jack of all trades but the master of none. It wanted to replace Discord but the video messaging was not stable enough. It wanted to replace Slack but message searching didn’t really work. It was still struggling to get a decent client and server implementation, and message loading times were a huge pain point.
Fast forward to today, most of the problems are still there. Give it a couple more years to cook.
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.
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 itMy experience is the same as yours, but I think the people complaining are the ones who are federated and are in large communities. Matrix apparently doesnt handle large rooms very well.
fair enough, that’s true. it was one of the reasons I turned off federation, even on a beefy server synapse still lagged and timed out when I would join medium sized rooms.
- DNS adjustments aren’t needed if you do .well-known delegations which is easier
- Can recommend continuwuity, it runs much better on less resources. Lacks certain features compared to Synapse but overall good
- Notifications (and read markers) depend on client-specific black magic to work
- Federation do sometimes silent-fail completely, you can reset continuwuity’s cache + restart when that happens. But full room history convergence needs patience
- Don’t join large rooms unless your server can handle the load
- Don’t host public rooms without modbots
The many small bugs make Matrix still bad - I wouldn’t recommend a non-tech user unless accompanied by a 24/7 admin. It is trying to improve but very slow because of reasons
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.
If you want a conduwuit sucessor, I’d choose the continuwuity project over tuwunel. The legitimacy as the sucessor is mainly self-proclaimed, and continuwuity is a community effort. The entire thing is kind of a shitshow, though. If you want to do it like 99% of people, make friends with Synapse.
I think what you describe still holds true. You need a few correct DNS entries and an open port. Once you want VoIP, some more ports and a TURN server will be necessary. And that one took me some effort, but the server itself (including federation) was well within my comfort zone. And I run continuwuity these days because Synapse wastes way too much resources for what I do and their other efforts went nowhere. But I’m not sure about the future of those smaller Matrix server projects.
And if you don’t like Matrix or can’t get it to run, maybe try something like XMPP.
Why do you prefer continuwuity? Curious as I’m running tuwunel.
We’ve had the discussion a while back here in selfhosted. You can find it here: https://awful.systems/post/5029223
Main points: Continued drama around people, and tuwunel is tied to a single, (paid) developer and I figure once there’s anything wrong with that, tuwunel might die instantly. While continuwuity is a community effort and maybe that’s a bit more sustainable. Though I don’t own any crystal ball and I don’t know how things will turn out.
If you want a conduwuit sucessor, I’d choose the continuwuity project over tuwunel.
You realise that sounds insane, right?
Sure, I believe that is supposed to be uWu or maybe some kind of puppy talk. It’s certainly originally started by June, who turned conduit (which is a sane name) into conduwuit.
I figured I’ve lost all shame anyway, back when we discussed nerd topics in the school bus or the 5 'o clock train, like Linux lore, anime, Star Trek concepts and technobabble. I mean people were staring and I’m aware of that, but I’ve really lost all F*'s to give. And that turns me into the person who I am today, and I’ll happily write sentences like the one above. Or still talk about Star Trek in a crowded train. And these days it’s the mycelial network and that really makes people question my sanity. 🫠
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).
Just host thelounge, its a web based irc client with integrated bouncer.
Unable to decrypt message. Please try again.
Ha!
While I appreciate the joke, I have not seen that problem in quite some time :D
I’ve last seen it last month. And I have an old chat, where FluffyChat and (“old”) Element show all messages by now, but Element X can’t decrypt many and both Elements report that they can’t guarantee the authenticity of many messages (even my own). For a long time, my chat partner could only read messages I sent via FluffyChat but not those sent by Element. I have not checked if that is still the case.
definetly report the problem. there’s a function for it in the app, 3 points menu on the chat list menu, use it after making those errors show up. tick the contact me box. ceo recommends to also notify himself directly: https://gist.github.com/ara4n/190ad712965d0f06e17f508d1a45b554
“can’t guarantee the authenticity of this message” just means it was restored from backup. In the same vein, if you can decrypt a message in any client, it should upload the keys to the message backup so it can be decrypted on other clients, even ones that haven’t logged in.
Some months ago, I had UTD issues with Element X too. My hs has been up for some years, and the devs claimed they had done a lot to fix UTDs.
I was about to bring the server down, but as a last resort decided to log out all but one Element web session which was able to decrypt the messages and try resetting the key backup. Haven’t had any UTD issues since then.
Maybe worth a try.
This is quite annoying. When will devs learn to tell people to resolve the problem instead of just showing a pointless error messages?
afaik those errors can’t really be solved by users. I mean other than using an up to date client and server.
If users cannot do anything because all encryption keys are lost, then they need to know that and also how to avoid the situation in the future.
I think it’s not a bug. It’s simply no one online who can share a decryption key.
Matrix encryption keys don’t need other people online - they get queued up as messages for each device you have.
its often a bug, because the clients who have the keys don’t know they should retry sending.
but also it’s all been fixed a year ago as I know. I don’t usually use dm rooms and public ones are not encrypted, so I wouldn’t know if I didn’t read about it.
I’ve only seen this message in the last months where different servers are having network issues and can’t talk
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
It’s still bad, and the foundation keeps digging itself into a deeper and deeper hole. Dead project.
Absolutely unbased take. Please ignore.
Matrix works fine, I have hosted a server on my own for several years through an ansible playbook here.
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 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.
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 host synapse as docker container behind traefik and it works pretty well. I have two users on my instance, have setup the mautrix-whatsapp bridge and federate with the instance of a friend.
The setup was straight forward: Pointing the sub-domain via traefik to the service and in the homeserver.yml enable well-known which announce port https with port 443 instead of 8448.
I’ve been wanting to get matrix up for my family and friends to chat with my 6 year old on her tablet. I found nextcloud talk to do all the things I wanted with none of the hassle. My daughter is a ridiculous texter.
