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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

#141

Post by styanax »

kassner wrote: post #55
styanax wrote: post #6

As a former user I felt these pain points trying to do nothing more than have a very active one-on-one chat with a good friend. Tens of messages an hour, maybe 2 years running. Using matrix.org and the pre-X clients. It's fine for group chat (IRC style) but that's not a high bar. (a) the encryption between using a mobile and the webapp desyncs/breaks all the time, it just sucks. I mean you'll get "cannot decrypt" a l…

> you can't correct a typo in a sent message in Delta At least on the iOS app you can, just tested it. I run my own postfix/dovecot, so shouldn’t require any esoteric configurations.

Good to know, thank you - those of us currently using it are on Androids so we've not had a friend on iOS join yet. We're using a chatmail relay.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#142

Post by styanax »

Arathorn wrote: post #73
styanax wrote: post #6

As a former user I felt these pain points trying to do nothing more than have a very active one-on-one chat with a good friend. Tens of messages an hour, maybe 2 years running. Using matrix.org and the pre-X clients. It's fine for group chat (IRC style) but that's not a high bar. (a) the encryption between using a mobile and the webapp desyncs/breaks all the time, it just sucks. I mean you'll get "cannot decrypt" a l…

I'm sorry you had a crap time, and agreed that in the past things were not great. But in defence of the Matrix team, we fixed almost all known encryption in ~Sept 2024, and the new generation of clients fixes the slow sync issues. In terms of message retention: https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/message_retentio... is how you should have/could have cleaned up those rooms. (It's not exposed in Element's UI ye…

Hi Arathorn, I recognize your name as the core developer lead. :) Alas, when I was trying to cull my old messages I tried that (and a lot of other API type hacks I found floating around) and none of them, at that time, worked.

In short: the complete lack of user-facing easy to use controls for data retention and culling in the Matrix (Element) clients is a deal killer for me. That painful experience taught me a lesson - now when I test something new, one of the first things I look for is "how do I extract from this thing?". I never want to go through my Matrix extraction pain again, so a personal life lesson was learned.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#143

Post by MattJ100 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #123
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #2

And I thought that XMPP felt broken...

I've had only one issue with ejabberd (didn't read the docs close enough and had to move from mnesia to sql when I hit the size limit) in over a decade of self-hosting it. Knowing which XEPs you actually want is a bit of a pain, but has gotten easier. Now I usually just periodically look at the current prosody example[1] which lists extensions by "essential" "recommended" "nice to have" and "other" and it's easy enou…

Prosody dev here. Good to know this is useful :)

One of my favourite small features we added in the latest release is a 'prosodyctl check features' command which will validate that your configuration is up to date with current best practices in various ways.

Although we like to curate the default configuration with care, people tend to keep their existing configuration file when they upgrade (we generally recommend this, as we aim for backwards compatibility). The new command makes it easier for folk who upgrade to ensure they are still getting the expected experience as the recommendations evolve.

Obviously that has to be somewhat opinionated. One thing many people appreciate about Prosody is that you can customize it however you want to, even if it's not following the mainstream. E.g. if you really don't care about synchronizing to multiple devices, you can totally disable that message cache. Don't need audio/video calls? Fine!

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#144

Post by The_President »

Arathorn wrote: post #139
The_President wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Looks excellent, sharp website - and I'll admit I hadn't looked for the white label app before talking shit. That offering looks excellent - I see an opportunity for a white label tier between community and enterprise for small/medium orgs with pricing listed on the website.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#145

Post by The_President »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #97
The_President wrote: post #47

Ran a homeserver for 5 years on a minimal VPS and it worked fine. Upsides - works everywhere, self hosted, feature complete. Client software in the ecosystem mostly felt bloated, with the exception of NeoChat. By 2022 the clients could no longer call each other. Decommissioned it this year in favor of traditional XMPP which works fine and it's nice that notifications are appropriately processed, finally. Our team hig…

Thanks for mentioning XMPP. I never ran a server, but as a user I've been enjoying it. Also has its problems - for example, I picked some server to create my first account, and the other day the server disappeared for 6 hours. What do normal users (i.e. non-newbies like me) do in practice in these situations? That said, I would love to hear your experience running an XMPP server. Do you still run it?

Trusting your chat activity and availability to any XMPP server on the internet that allows free public registration is not ideal. If you want reliability then pay for it or use what you perceive as a highly credible free server. I do not run any public facing XMPP services so I do not have any input on that and as with Matrix I wouldn't roll your own unless you know exactly what you're doing due to inherit risks associated with these platforms in certain states of configuration or exposure.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#146

Post by The_President »

Tmpod wrote: post #117
The_President wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

They've been on their game with this product, which hadn't been on my radar until Aaron's response above.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#147

Post by jedahan »

Arathorn wrote: post #90
jedahan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt bad making a long thread once I opened Element X and saw it didn't have support for threads. Someone let me know later that threads are hidden behind a Labs setting, but it only allows the client to reply to threads, but still exposes the entire thread inline for the channel which sucks up all the air in the chat.

this is wrong - the threads support in labs lets you create threads and navigate into them as you expect. what you are describing is the old threads workaround which predates the proper solution in labs which should exit labs asap.

I am describing what I see on Element X on iOS today. If someone replies to threads, it is not hidden and navigable on this client. Even after switching the labs feature on, the app was showing the thread interspersed with the rest of the conversation.

Uninstalling the app, reinstalling, and making sure the labs option is turned on before navigating to a room with threads, is behaving how I expect.

So maybe, its a bug that the room does not re-render after toggling that setting.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#148

Post by ailurooo »

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…

god if there was a comprehensive chat protocol without a loser ceo i'd move to it tomorrow. matrix org staff don't know how to interact with other human beings.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#149

Post by JadedBlueEyes »

jchw wrote: post #120
JadedBlueEyes wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FTR the server stats are from https://matrixrooms.info/stats. It's not a full view of the network but it's a reasonable sampling, based on servers discovered through public room aliases and servers that use it as a notary (trusted key server).

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#150

Post by octoberfranklin »

BrenBarn wrote: post #129
octoberfranklin wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea here is that rooms are abstracted from servers and sort-of exist ephemerally No, that's not even remotely true. In fact the opposite is true. The domain name of the server used to create the room is perpetually and permanently embedded in the room name and can't be changed, ever .

That doesn't have any practical effect, though. It's just part of the name and the room can still be used even if that server disappears forever.

No, not at all. Posession of a CA-signed TLS certificate for that domain, and the corresponding private key, is basically the root of trust for room operations.
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