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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

#111

Post by lousken »

chromatin wrote: post #101
lousken wrote: post #34

Same setup here since 2017. Since then, RAM usage decreased by 60%. The admin panel is not something I'd need but it would be a nice-to-have. Started with postgres as I wouldn't go for anything else if I wanna use it for decades. It has 2.5GBs for 10users and I don't mind if it takes 10 or 20, that's something I expected. Never did a cleanup of anything, I just dumped the db and moved to OVH recently onto a new VPS w…

Conduit [1] has retention policies [2] for media and attachments! [1] https://conduit.rs/ and https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit [2] https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/blob/next/docs/configur...

Honestly this doesn't fit my usecase. If I understand it correctly, it is just like any other retention policy meaning it is not related to the fact that the attachment was deleted by user, but it just deletes everything after a certain point.

I don't mind storing things that people can access for many years - if I wanna see that funny picture from 10 years ago, I should be able to find it (even though GUI in Element sucks for that now). But what I do care about are things they uploaded accidentally or that they wanted to delete for whatever reason and it stayed on my server.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#112

Post by lousken »

0x1ch wrote: post #89
lousken wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't plan to give up just yet. Switching is way too difficult and I don't see many platforms having both solid desktop and mobile versions with e2ee. But if they dare rewriting anything again from scratch I am leaving. They MUST stick with what they have and make it good at this point.

None of my friends ever migrated from Discord to my server for over a year, so not much is lost. I'll join more actively maintained instances to stick around the communities and chats I found for myself.

90% of my friends migrated, so I do have a problem on my hands.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#113

Post by lousken »

Teever wrote: post #106
0x1ch wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever is going on in Matrix land isn't stable enough for most people to switch. I gave up after they broke their calling system after changing something to this livekit system. It doesn't work, my existing TURN server became useless, and Matrix was left as a very slow chat application. I'm over it.

I gave up after I upgraded my server from a SQLite backend to a PostgreSQL one with their conversion script which introduced errors into my DB. Maybe one day I'll dig into it and see if I can fix the DB by extracting whatever data in it that's causing the errors, but like, is it really worth it at this point? What does running a matrix server get me in 2025?

Haven't been on the main matrix.org server for many years, but they used to have a lot of issues with latency - it wasn't really instant messaging but more like email. When I felt it was the worst, I decided on self hosting it. That improved things significantly - it started to behave like an instant msg platform. Now with OVH migration I am even able to scroll through hundreds of attachments super fast and everything feels snappy.

And I also know there is no online status on the main server. Other than that, no idea

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#114

Post by Almondsetat »

warkdarrior wrote: post #110
Almondsetat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 th…

>> 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. The point is that with the help of hardware-backed DRM on the client, the Matrix server could send data only to unmodified clients. You modified your client in a way that does not match what the Matrix serve…

You're repeating the same thing with more words. If you cannot control your hardware-backed DRM, then Matrix requires proprietary blobs to work.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#115

Post by Arathorn »

Teever wrote: post #106
0x1ch wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever is going on in Matrix land isn't stable enough for most people to switch. I gave up after they broke their calling system after changing something to this livekit system. It doesn't work, my existing TURN server became useless, and Matrix was left as a very slow chat application. I'm over it.

I gave up after I upgraded my server from a SQLite backend to a PostgreSQL one with their conversion script which introduced errors into my DB. Maybe one day I'll dig into it and see if I can fix the DB by extracting whatever data in it that's causing the errors, but like, is it really worth it at this point? What does running a matrix server get me in 2025?

> What does running a matrix server get me in 2025?

Is there any other FOSS, self-hosted, decentralised platform with E2EE chat & E2EE group VoIP - i.e. the equivalent of Signal, but without depending on a centralised service?

From my pov (which is biased, as Matrix project lead), the downsides are:

* We still expose too much metadata to the server. Work is afoot to fix this, though - e.g. https://youtu.be/Q6NSmptZIS4?t=933 for encrypted state events.

* Synapse is still uses waaaaay too much database. I proposed a solution here: https://youtu.be/D5zAgVYBuGk?t=1852 but it needs to get properly implemented.

* Element's transition from the legacy apps to Element X has not been smooth, causing much of the gnashing of teeth in this thread (e.g. lack of interop between 1:1 voip and group-e2ee voip, or teething problems in the new apps).

* Post Quantum Encryption hasn't landed yet; it's been painful to get funding together for it.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#116

Post by eTomte »

I've been running synapse on a small VPS for the past few years. I got some of the bridges working too. Def bumps along the way, but its still the daily driver for me and about five other people.

Recently I spun up the new ESS Community Edition on a new VPS. Much easier to get up and running. I was delightfully surprised. although since that one uses kubernetes and other things I'm not familiar with getting bridges and other things I've become used to is going to require more learning on my part. Since ESS is so new, not a lot of newbie friendly howtos yet out there.

I remain optimistic.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#117

Post by Tmpod »

The_President wrote: post #96
Arathorn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did address the elephant eventually with https://github.com/element-hq/element-admin a few months ago. In terms of VoIP interop - yes, one of the worst bits of Matrix is that the legacy 1:1 VoIP calling is not interoperable with MatrixRTC-based (multiparty) VoIP calling, but we ran out of time/cash to implement interop and instead focused on making MatrixRTC work well. (Does XMPP give you E2EE multiparty calling o…

Another cashflow idea, as if you don't think of many yourself: A white-label version of Element (called something else) that can be deployed as scoped to an organization and based on an LTS release schedule. We'd gladly pay for this.

Well, I can't check if it is still a thing today, but Element's managed servers used to allow you to do that, at least for the web app (though I had the idea they also did that for the old mobile apps?)

Here's a couple of links:

https://element.io/blog/custom-branding/

https://element.io/blog/a-white-label-messaging-app-to-creat...

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#118

Post by tcfhgj »

this_user wrote: post #93
tcfhgj wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are motivated to replace it with something better, it's called Matrix 2.0.

Which perfectly fits the Matrix ethos of everything constantly being rewritten or replaced with something new that only implements half the features before the original thing is ever finished.

I like this more than sticking to things you know you won't be happy with.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#120

Post by jchw »

JadedBlueEyes wrote: post #66
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…

This doesn't really excuse it, but to give you some idea of why Element haven't spent any time on dendrite right now, here's a sample of active servers on the federation as of today: 2025-12-01 synapse : 10068 (85.8%) conduit : 476 (4.1%) dendrite : 369 (3.1%) continuwuity : 303 (2.6%) To add on to that, none of their customers use it, and there's no real community around it, unlike the independent Conduit-family ser…

I honestly don't blame them that Dendrite didn't work out, I blame them for leaving us all stranded without any sort of migration path. I don't personally care if my homeserver is written in Python or Go or Rust, at least not very much. Rust may very well be a better choice than Go in the long run. I only chose Dendrite because when I chose it I felt like it was in better shape than Conduit (which at the time wasn't forked off, wasn't well-supported by app services either, and didn't handle federated presence) and lighter weight than Synapse.

Is my homeserver even counted in the 369 active Dendrite servers anyway? I mean, I guess it definitely isn't in that count since it is now an active Synapse server instead, as of late November. However for what it's worth, I don't think I actually connect to Matrix.org at all. Maybe it still counts if you're in a room with Matrix.org users?

But assuming it is basically just 369 Dendrite servers, well, they're all stuck there. How hard could it have been to provide a migration path? I dunno. My attempt is definitely incomplete and possibly quite ill-advised. I truthfully don't understand Dendrite or Synapse well enough to design a migration tool that works correctly. Did I calculate forward extremities correctly? Maybe. Are my state groups actually all correct? Probably not. How the hell did I end up with rooms that have multiple auth events? I have no idea, I just wound up destroying the corrupted rooms I found. I can only imagine that whoever developed the Dendrite database structure also had knowledge of how the Synapse database structure works and would've been able to do all of this in many less hours than I was.

After all is said and done I'm sure the balance sheets will look much better but the damage done to the community side of things will linger. I won't feel bad if Element fails and Matrix winds up replaced by a different standard later.

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