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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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. 🫠
My matrix server is nearing 5 years old. I have federation disabled, because I don’t need that - we are using it as a family chat. sqlite database I’m using is now 2GB, but other than that it is working great.
I do acknowledge that I’m not leveraging the things matrix is designed for (federation, e2e encryption), but to be honest, it’s not really good at that.
Unable to decrypt message. Please try again.
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.
https://matrix.org/docs/matrix-concepts/end-to-end-encryption/
Key sharing When an event cannot be decrypted due to missing keys, a client may want to request them from other clients which may have them.
That page seemed outdated, but: From further down that page:
The recommended strategy is to share the keys automatically only to verified devices of the same user
This is the same situation where the key backup is accessible - which is not described on that page, but it’s a key store of all the megolm keys. This is what is now generally used instead of that as it doesn’t require devices to be online and allows recovering keys if all devices are lost.
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.
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.
“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.
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
I’ve only seen this message in the last months where different servers are having network issues and can’t talk
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.
I use conduit. And really happy with it. Since I use 3 bridges the compose.yml is a mess. It works really nice. The sliding feature boosts all media files. But there is always something broken or misconfigured. Actually my WhatsApp bridge blocks all mediafiles and I was too busy to fix it already.
Conduit is long dead. Upgrade to tuwunnel, its successor, while its still binary compatible…
All bridges works fine here.
Continuwuity developer here - Conduit is reviving itself, and you can no longer move from Conduit to tuwunel or Continuwuity. You haven’t been able to for as long as either project has existed. You might be confusing conduwuit with Conduit.
Conduwuit has another child? What the difference between continuwuity and tuwunnel?
https://continuwuity.org/ or https://forgejo.ellis.link/continuwuation/continuwuity
As for the difference: https://lemmy.world/post/33271240
IRC and XMPP are infinitely less painful, honestly, and both were designed around federation from the ground up, long before it was cool.
IRC does not have any federation, and XMPP does it in a completely different way from Matrix that has unique pros and cons.
IRC is designed for you to connect to a specific server, with an account on that server, to talk to other people on that server. There is no federation, you cannot talk to oftc from libera.chat. Alongside that, with mobile devices being so common, you’d need to get people to host their own bouncer, or host one for nearly everyone on your network.
XMPP federation conceptually has one major difference compared to Matrix: XMPP rooms are owned by the server that created them, whereas Matrix rooms are equally “owned” by everyone participating in it, with the only deciding factor being which users have administrator permissions.
This makes for better (and easier) scaling on XMPP, so rooms with 50k people isn’t that big of an issue for any users in that room. However, if the server owning the room goes down, the whole room is down, and nobody can chat. See Google Talk dropping XMPP federation after making a mess of most client and server implementations.
On Matrix, scaling is a much bigger issue, as everyone connects with everyone else. Your single-person homeserver has to talk with every other homeserver you interact with. If you join a lot of big rooms, this adds up, and takes a lot of resources. However, when a homeserver goes down, only the people on that homeserver are affected, not the rooms. Just recently, matrix.org had some trouble with their database going down. Although it was a bit quieter than usual, I only properly noticed when it was explicitly mentioned in chat by someone else. My service was not interrupted, as I host my own homeserver.
The Matrix method of federation definitely comes with some issues, some conceptually, and some from the implementation. However, a single entity cannot take down the federated Matrix network, even when taking down the most used homeservers. XMPP is effectively killed off by doing the same.
You’re absolutely incorrect about IRC. Would you like to learn? Open IRC federation is basically never used anymore and the few networks that exist are very stable (if not completely calcified), but it is a core feature of the design, and in the old days, massive interconnected networks of IRC servers like EFnet and Undernet spanned the globe, there were even some servers that allowed open federation (EFnet is actually named for it – eris-free-net referring to the last server “eris” that supported free federation), and at some points Netsplits were a frustratingly daily occurrence. Like with any federation, abuse is the reason we can’t really have nice things anymore, but IRC absolutely supports federation. Not very well from a modern standpoint since it didn’t really keep up with the abuse arms race, but when it was first conceived it was way ahead of its time.
“Open IRC federation is basically never used anymore”
so you admit IRC isn’t federated, lmfao
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.
Matrix seems to work well. I’m on a smallish non-profit server. I regard it as the premium open-source step forward from IRC.
The worst problem is that there are really no channels that I care to follow.
You might want to check out https://matrixrooms.info/, which is good for a search around. Some project communities also have offtopic rooms that are good to chat in. Even very small rooms can be very active.
Matrix works perfectly for me, if you’re setting up a new server, I’d go with tuwunel. I’m stuck on synapse, when the tuwunel team makes a way to migrate, I’ll do it.
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.
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.
Tbh I had no issues with synapse.
The problems that persist: Very rare issues with decrypting (as I rarely encounter it, while being in encrypted chats with 150+ users, it’s not an issue for me), apart from after you changed clients, slow image loading (a bit annoying, but ok if you multitask anyway) and clients all having different feature sets (some of which you can also hackily make work in others).
I use https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy which makes it pretty painless to self host on a vpc with Synapse as the server.
I don’t have federation setup, since I just use it with friends. So besides running the update command once a week, I don’t even think about maintaince.
Matrix works good. Two years ago Element should’ve been what element Next is today. But it is getting there. It still has great backers and lots of users. As long as there is no direct alternative, it’ll get there.
I don’t want american companies owning all my data and neither do companies want that.
It’s not the shiny new kid anymore but there is no other new shiny kid. Hence, it is still the brightest and newest kid.
