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Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

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Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#131

Post by BrenBarn »

maelito wrote: post #9

I've been using Matrix for several years as a user. It works great. The problems decrypting messages have gone. X is becoming a good client. I'm deleting my whatsapp and télégram accounts in a few weeks after a painful week-long backup... Edit : I wonder how easy it is to backup a Matrix accounts's data. Conversations and files.

> I wonder how easy it is to backup a Matrix accounts's data. Conversations and files.

Not as easy as you might hope. The Element client has an export feature, but you have to manually activate it on each room/chat, and the export has a size cap so it may not work if you have lots of files you want to save. It's also pretty slow if the room has a lot of history. You could also try using something like Matrix Commander (a command-line client), but I couldn't get that to work fully either.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#132

Post by BrenBarn »

Barathkanna wrote: post #46

TLDR Self-hosting isn’t dying because people stopped caring. It’s dying because the complexity has gotten out of hand. This post highlights how something that used to be a fun, lightweight hobby has turned into a full-time maintenance burden. Systems like Matrix are powerful, but they’ve become so intricate that even skilled engineers struggle to run them reliably. The result is a slow drift back toward centralized p…

Yeah, I think this is true and it's unfortunate. I think it's one of the areas where what seemed like the plan for Matrix hasn't totally worked out in practice. And it's even just the intricacy of managing it; some of the problems are deeper in the design. When I started using it several years ago, it seemed their vision was a lot of people running a lot of small servers. But the full-replication nature of the protocol, plus the resource demands of the server software, make that kind of impractical. Even tech-oriented people may shy away if they find out the database could grow to tens of gigabytes, and Synapse is not exactly light on RAM or CPU either.

Perhaps in the future if implementations improve some of this may get better, and it will become more feasible for small operators to run their own servers. But by that time it will be harder to build trust because too many people will have written it off as bloated or unstable. I think it would have been better to start lean and keep the system in more of a nerd niche until that process of evolution reached a later stage.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#133

Post by BrenBarn »

Arathorn wrote: post #67

There's a bunch of outdated info in here, unfortunately: > Does not have an admin panel The admin panel is at https://github.com/element-hq/element-admin (but it's relatively new, so many folks haven't noticed it exists) > No image captions > > This is silly, but while (official?) bridges support image captions, official Element app does not. Element Web & X support captions. (Element Web doesn't currently support au…

> if i've got any of the above wrong please just say, rather than downvote :D

Maybe it's not necessarily that any of those are wrong per se as that they just don't address several other important issues raised in the article, such as (copied from headings in the article):

* Needs constant cleanup

* Database grows out of control

* Element X is now recommended as the new and better client. It is not.

* Calls are not backward compatible

Also saying the info is "outdated" because a bug was fixed two weeks ago (and you're not even sure if it made it into a built yet!) seems pretty disingenuous. More generally, I think the timeline on which info becomes "outdated" is maybe different for you than for actual users. Actual users expect to install it and have everything work. If there are major bugs, protocol changes, and app-throwaway-and-rewrites happening on a timescale of 2-3 years, that's still too fast for most people to consider their info outdated. If everything were going swimmingly with none of these problems for like 5 years, then yeah, okay, but that's not the situation.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#134

Post by catelm »

Barathkanna wrote: post #46

TLDR Self-hosting isn’t dying because people stopped caring. It’s dying because the complexity has gotten out of hand. This post highlights how something that used to be a fun, lightweight hobby has turned into a full-time maintenance burden. Systems like Matrix are powerful, but they’ve become so intricate that even skilled engineers struggle to run them reliably. The result is a slow drift back toward centralized p…

NixOS makes this rather easy too. There exist modules for synapse, livekit, etc (MAS module is still a Pull Request, though) and the setup is quite doable: https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Matrix

However, you still need to know what you are doing (the manual helps) and connect the pieces (in theory there could be a nixpkgs module that does this for you but apparently nobody did bother). Once its done you can lean back.

I've been running my homeserver happily for > 5 years and it was fairly straightforward.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#135

Post by oblio »

catelm wrote: post #134
Barathkanna wrote: post #46

TLDR Self-hosting isn’t dying because people stopped caring. It’s dying because the complexity has gotten out of hand. This post highlights how something that used to be a fun, lightweight hobby has turned into a full-time maintenance burden. Systems like Matrix are powerful, but they’ve become so intricate that even skilled engineers struggle to run them reliably. The result is a slow drift back toward centralized p…

NixOS makes this rather easy too. There exist modules for synapse, livekit, etc (MAS module is still a Pull Request, though) and the setup is quite doable: https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Matrix However, you still need to know what you are doing (the manual helps) and connect the pieces (in theory there could be a nixpkgs module that does this for you but apparently nobody did bother). Once its done you can lean back. I'…

Yeah, but then you have to run NixOS, which besides the sheer difficulty of being Linux, for the average user, stacks Nix on top, which comes with its own learning curve.

Also, based on your description, you're a techie. I highly doubt the average city hall clerk will set up their on Matrix server.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#136

Post by oblio »

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.

https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Copy-paste the link, otherwise the Easter egg might be offensive to some :-D

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#137

Post by tcfhgj »

Jnr wrote: post #54
tcfhgj wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I tried it a year ago when it was introduced, it did not work. Is it stable now?

Matrix 2.0?

Not quite yet, but it was promised that the next release will be Matrix 2.0

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#138

Post by Jnr »

tcfhgj wrote: post #137
Jnr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried it a year ago when it was introduced, it did not work. Is it stable now?

Matrix 2.0? Not quite yet, but it was promised that the next release will be Matrix 2.0

I guess it was the Element X client that was advertised as Matrix 2.0 client and that did not work.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#139

Post by Arathorn »

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.

That is Element’s current business model: https://element.io/en/pro-app and https://element.io/server-suite/pro.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#140

Post by tcfhgj »

Jnr wrote: post #138
tcfhgj wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix 2.0? Not quite yet, but it was promised that the next release will be Matrix 2.0

I guess it was the Element X client that was advertised as Matrix 2.0 client and that did not work.

It does (now), been using it daily for months now
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