this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
64 points (95.7% liked)

Selfhosted

40347 readers
386 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

There seem to be plentiful options for text chat servers, so I'm curious for those that self-host their own, what their preferences & experiences have been with them.

Also those mentioned in the title were just a few examples, if you run something else, e.g. Revolt or Mattermost or something else less popular, would be interested in reading about it!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have tried a few other matrix servers (dendrite and conduit), something always ended up not working because they don't implement everything synapse (the reference server) does, or there were bugs - generally audio/video calling or file transfer would break. Synapse worked out of the box. It also has good documentation.

I don't see any performance problems or abnormal resource usage with synapse either. As I said I don't use it that much, so maybe there is something nasty I didn't see yet. From what I've read, it is only a problem when you federate with "large" instances/rooms, but my server is not federated, it's just a basic private chat server.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yes, synapse performs and scales well at this point. They had to optimize it for the large scale deployments (e.g. government, health care). Dendrite and conduit need less ram after joining large rooms. Conduit even idles around 100MB if it's only on few small rooms, which is pretty awesome.

I never actually used audio/video calling since I mainly use matrix for communities and sometimes bridging, so dendrite and even conduit worked well for me for a long time. Now that dendrite is baasically feature complete I'm curious when was the last time you used it? I remember having issues with bridges one or two years ago.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Now that dendrite is baasically feature complete I’m curious when was the last time you used it? I remember having issues with bridges one or two years ago.

About that time, yeah, ~1 year ago.

I needed a full replacement for RocketChat (ditched RC for many reasons, unaddressed security/privacy issues, painful and frequent major version upgrades, dependency on mongodb, corporate-driven development/removing security features from community edition, no lifecycle/EOL policy...) so I needed proper file upload/audio/video chat integration - Currently using the jitsi-meet integration, but might switch to element-call someday... In this regard my current setup appears to work well, so there's no incentive to change...

I also wanted to set up a few bridges, started implementing the IRC bridge but didn't go very far (tried going off the beaten path and making it work with podman, it might take a while). The steam chat bridge is also planned, but it doesn't appear to be very well-maintained and I'm afraid it will break without warning, and the signal bridge which looks OK.

Currently I'm juggling between clients for all these different chat networks, feels like it's 2002 again.

Ansible role to deploy/maintain Synapse + Element-web here if you're interested.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Never change a running system :D

Thanks for the link to playbook. Since I only need a few bridges I just used docker compose and set the services up manually. I'm probably going to set it up with nixos at some point (though I'm gonna have to figure out how well an IPv6-only matrix server works, since my ISP took my v4 away on favor of ds-lite).