I have been hosting synapse for 2 years now and it's been a smooth sail. I don't recall having any major breaking changes, most updates are smooth. Element client itself is definitely PITA but it's getting better
Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years
41–50 of 159 posts
Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years
#42> While technically, Synapse can work with a sqlite database (and which at first seems like an OK choice for having I want to hear more about this. Is this because Synapse’s SQLite support is half-baked? What sort of corruption are we taking about?
I use sqlite for synapse (since ~2 years) and I haven't noticed any corruption at all. I am in lot of rooms (20-30) with 1k-2k users in a lot of them and the db size is 8.8G currently
Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
A protocol can mandate forced deletion. A particular client implementation may ignore it, or some users may circumvent it, so it would be a weaker kind of feature, but still a feature. And depending on circumstances it can be quite useful.
An open protocol can mandate indeed, but that is still in the realm of pinky promise security. A better design for a privacy-friendly chat protocol is to not write a lot of stuff on a lot of different remote servers when that's not necessary IMHO. One of matrix's selling points is to be censorship-proof though; in that case copying stuff as much as possible makes a lot more sense.
>pinky promise security
You are right, though I still prefer "weak feature" as a term :) There's enough value in such things. Cryptography crowd is concentrated on omnipotent Eve breaking ciphers, and that wrench from xkcd, but I dare to claim that majority of both commercial and private leaks happen just because well-intentioned users don't have enough capacity to keep track of all the things, and proverbially think twice. Features like "unsend", or timed deletion are indeed laughable on their purely technical merits, but do wonders saving users from grave mistakes anyway.
Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
I think they're talking about Solid, Tim Berners-Lee's newer venture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr...
Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know such definition frankly. And to the best of my knowledge there are plenty of things which people call "protocols" strongly prescribing actions non-verifiable in the very sense you used. That said I'm not here for a terminological discussion. We may call it green cheese, but it's still a useful feature.
Nobody claimed it isn't a useful feature. The only claim I made is that it cannot be mandated with an open protocol, so if you expect 100% adherence in the name of privacy, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.
Good, nobody claimed any expectation of 100% adherence as well!
Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years
#46TLDR 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 platforms, not out of preference, but because convenience keeps winning over autonomy. It’s a reminder of the growing gap between the ideal of a user-owned internet and the realities of modern software.
Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years
#47Ran 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 highly appreciates the work done in Matrix it's just unfortunate that the elephant in the room was never addressed at the start of the project, which is the need for a -simple- first-party administrative dashboard or tool to manage users, storage, and configuration. Without that core component, then you've got a layer of complexity between an admin and an audit which will increase likelihood of misconfiguration or resource management issues.
Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years
#48>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-…
A protocol can mandate forced deletion. A particular client implementation may ignore it, or some users may circumvent it, so it would be a weaker kind of feature, but still a feature. And depending on circumstances it can be quite useful.
People should related to anything federated like email. If you send something it is in someone else's computer now. With matrix or any e2ee protocols it is depending on pinky promise of the client to modify it. I thought the whole Snapchat fiasco already taught us that. Did we forget?
Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years
#49I'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…
In a healthier ecosystem with many stakeholders and sponsors this is less of a concern. However, instead of Matrix Foundation gaining more independence, it seems like almost everything moved out of the Matrix Foundation and into a for-profit company. Clearly, things didn't go according to plan.
Most of us just running homeservers are just random people who have no power over this situation and not enough money to make a dent in their budget needs. For us, Matrix was sold as an open E2EE chat system, and we bought in. Does us buying in do anything for Matrix Foundation/Element? I dunno. Maybe it helps sell Matrix to get broader adoption. Either way, we took a gamble on it, potentially instead of other solutions.
Now the free and open source Matrix homeserver has to compete with a closed source commercial one. I sort of hope there's a happy ending on this one, but it sure looks dicey to me right now.
Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years
#50> The only thing that I don't really understand is the decision on data replication. If a user on server A joins a room on server B, recent room data is copied from server B to server A and then kept in sync on both servers.
The idea here is that rooms are abstracted from servers and sort-of exist ephemerally. This has the advantage/disadvantage of making it hard for the underlying infrastructure to exert control over the hosted communities, and seems to have become a distinguishing feature of federation.
My experience of Matrix as a possible replacement for Discord has led me to believe it's mostly a disadvantage since it leads to gross misalignments between the communities in top and the infrastructure providers underneath. I consider e.g. Discourse to be much healthier (although I would like to see an app for Discourse so that my Discourse communities behave more like Discord/Slack servers) and it's frustrating to me that there hasn't been a clear "Discourse for chat" emerge to replace Discord.