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Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

yaky.dev

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Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#11

Post by philipallstar »

jchw wrote: post #8

I've mentioned this here before, but it bears repeating. A couple years ago or so, I made the catastrophic choice to use Dendrite as my homeserver software. It seemed like a safe bet: it was supposedly lighter weight than Synapse, being written in Go instead of Python and with everything reengineered from the ground up. It didn't support everything, but nothing in the disclaimers made it seem like it was about to abr…

> Maybe some day I will be less bitter. I mean, Matrix is free, how much can I really be angry if it didn't work how I wanted it to. But, it's hard. I tried to buy in hard, and wound up making a lot of trouble for me and a small group of people that I inadvertently looped into my own mess. I trusted Matrix because it seemed to be the leading option, but definitely I will now be much, much more careful before adopting an ecosystem into my life and the life of people around me. For example, I still have no ActivityPub server... Maybe it's better if I just wait and see what happens there before jumping in, if I'm going to.

Sorry this is your experience - my only small comment on this last part is here: if there's no financial incentive to keep things running then it is very possible that they won't. Money isn't some evil thing we should alternatives to. It's how we value relatively our time and effort vs other people's time and effort.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#12

Post by Almondsetat »

>this also creates a situation where anything said across federation cannot be unsaid, which is an ironic situation for a protocol/system that often comes up when talking about privacy.

How is it ironic? No protocol in the world can force anyone to delete anything from their own device. Chat apps that implement this function are either proprietary (so you cannot control what they can do) or, if OSS, do it on a pinky-promise-basis.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#13

Post by a3w »

Almondsetat wrote: post #12

>this also creates a situation where anything said across federation cannot be unsaid, which is an ironic situation for a protocol/system that often comes up when talking about privacy. How is it ironic? No protocol in the world can force anyone to delete anything from their own device. Chat apps that implement this function are either proprietary (so you cannot control what they can do) or, if OSS, do it on a pinky-…

Right, but we did have efforts to take over hardware security enclaves to deliver user data, instead of copyrighted company data, to user devices.

Tim Berners-Lee tries to make the internet a place where you can choose, what it "forgets". At least that were the news I got from the 2010s and early 2020s. As for how: DRM-like tech in the hands of users should allow for that.

So having privacy by design would be nice, and e.g. many messengers try to do "it is inconvenient to copy a message that someone send you that is marked as view-only-once-or-up-to-a-timespan, but of course, you can use an external camera, i.e. make more low-fidelity copies or even exfiltrate data".

Even F/LOS software can use/would be forced to use these proprietary enclaves or at least non-user accessible key stores. (As far as I understand hardware level DRM.)

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#15

Post by dust-jacket »

Almondsetat wrote: post #12

>this also creates a situation where anything said across federation cannot be unsaid, which is an ironic situation for a protocol/system that often comes up when talking about privacy. How is it ironic? No protocol in the world can force anyone to delete anything from their own device. Chat apps that implement this function are either proprietary (so you cannot control what they can do) or, if OSS, do it on a pinky-…

Yeah I thought this was a weird take too. Too often people take privacy for "I can do what I like". IMO deleting something you've sent to someone else is not a privacy concern at all.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#16

Post by Almondsetat »

a3w wrote: post #13
Almondsetat wrote: post #12

>this also creates a situation where anything said across federation cannot be unsaid, which is an ironic situation for a protocol/system that often comes up when talking about privacy. How is it ironic? No protocol in the world can force anyone to delete anything from their own device. Chat apps that implement this function are either proprietary (so you cannot control what they can do) or, if OSS, do it on a pinky-…

Right, but we did have efforts to take over hardware security enclaves to deliver user data, instead of copyrighted company data, to user devices. Tim Berners-Lee tries to make the internet a place where you can choose, what it "forgets". At least that were the news I got from the 2010s and early 2020s. As for how: DRM-like tech in the hands of users should allow for that. So having privacy by design would be nice, a…

>Tim Berners-Lee tries to make the internet a place where you can choose, what it "forgets". At least that were the news I got from the 2010s and early 2020s.

Tim Berners-Lee created the web, not the internet, which is what chat apps use. Also, unless you can provide some direct quotes about it being designed for "forgetting" stuff, I have no idea where these "news" you got came from.

>As for how: DRM-like tech in the hands of users should allow for that.

If it's in the hands of the users, i.e. open source, it can be disabled at any moment, which is exactly what my reply already addressed.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#17

Post by Jnr »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #2

And I thought that XMPP felt broken...

XMPP felt great when compared to Matrix. Matrix was in a bad state some years ago when I hosted it for a while, and seems like it still is the same messy state. I avoid it as much as possible but for some reason there are communities using it.

At this point it should just die so people would be motivated to replace it with something better.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#18

Post by bityard »

dust-jacket wrote: post #15
Almondsetat wrote: post #12

>this also creates a situation where anything said across federation cannot be unsaid, which is an ironic situation for a protocol/system that often comes up when talking about privacy. How is it ironic? No protocol in the world can force anyone to delete anything from their own device. Chat apps that implement this function are either proprietary (so you cannot control what they can do) or, if OSS, do it on a pinky-…

Yeah I thought this was a weird take too. Too often people take privacy for "I can do what I like". IMO deleting something you've sent to someone else is not a privacy concern at all.

I don't agree with it myself, but there are people who seem to want to frame "the right to be forgotten" as a privacy issue.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#19

Post by [deleted] »

Almondsetat wrote: post #12

>this also creates a situation where anything said across federation cannot be unsaid, which is an ironic situation for a protocol/system that often comes up when talking about privacy. How is it ironic? No protocol in the world can force anyone to delete anything from their own device. Chat apps that implement this function are either proprietary (so you cannot control what they can do) or, if OSS, do it on a pinky-…

[deleted]

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#20

Post by 24t »

To add another data point, I've been hosting a (tiny) matrix server for a few months. I'm pretty comfortable with self-hosting using docker, so I opted not to use the ansible scripts in the hope that it'd keep my setup simpler and more maintainable. Somehow I didn't find any mentions of ESS until Synapse was already up and running, but Kubernetes would have been a dealbreaker for similar reasons.

In this short time I've run a database migration (sqlite is the default, but MAS requires postgres), tried and failed to migrate to MAS (required to use Element X) and have lost a couple of days messing around with coturn and eturnal with nothing to show for it -- my calls still don't connect when NAT is involved. I have to tell new users to ignore the recommendations to install Element X until I get MAS working.

There's a lot of room for foundational improvements here, even updating docs to point would-be server admins to the recommended setup du jour would help.

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