As r/selfhosted seems to have shutdown due to the reddit api changes (rip), I wanted to see if anyone has worked with these services before?
How do they compare to Discord and how hard is it to maintain, as the setup looks pretty in depth for matrix and synapse. How did you convince your user base to use it over Discord.
I’ve hosted TS3 for about 8 years and are looking for alternatives, as we have to use Discord for screen sharing.
Thanks!
I do. I’ve been hosting it for 3 years now. I have seen them add new features rapidly, and it’s pretty exciting, things can (rarely) break sometimes (cause you didn’t read the upgrade notes before upgrading).
They had something called communities, which they scrapped for Spaces. Spaces are more akin to a server on Discord for the most part. I don’t use Discord too much, so there could be some features missing that I have not noticed.
I didn’t intend to bring them to me, I intended to go to them using bridges. If you have a Discord server, investigate how to bridge to that discord server (either personally via double puppeting bridges or maintain a complete copy of the server using relay bridges). This way over time you can bring people over to your matrix instance cause these companies do mess up (at this point its not will its when). Similar with signal, googlechat etc.
It is fun and fairly easy.
Mumble in combination with XMPP is the most hassle free and low resource option. Just for small personal use snikket.org XMPP is probably the best.
Matrix Synapse also works, but if you join any large rooms it will blow up ram and storage space usage, thus I can’t really recommend it.
Matrix has one caveat: it synchronizes every room (group chat) from another instance to your instance fully- which one user subscribed to on your instance. Because of this the instance-systems/servers are under heavy load for private userage (not controllable number of users and chats). Many governmental institutions (controllable number of users and chats) use though, because in case of “disasters/incidents” the data is not lost but saved all over all replicas.
So if I only run one Matrix/Synapse instance for my private group, does any of the matrix decentalized technology effect me? I would only have one instance, and my users will probably only be connected to my instance. Though if I’m understanding correctly, it sounds like if I subscribed to another instance, all of the chat communication on that entire instance is copied to my server as well? Does this include files? Sounds like it would use a lot of extra disk space.
It would replicate this one specific group/chat only - from the moment of subscription. Depending on the load it can get heavy on your instance.
Do you know if this happens the other way around? A user chats with a different server and that chat is synced to my server. Can I use federation without allowing others to join mine outside my group? Because otherwise, it sounds like my server’s data will be copied to a different server.
I self-host a Synapse (Matrix) server on a VPS and it’s been working great for well over a year now. I do so via Docker and it seems very stable.
I would like to find an alternative as well . I mostly use one discord sever that the users would be happy to switch to a self hosted option.
Yeah, I’m hosting a Synapse instance; have been for a few years now. The biggest complication was the reverse proxy set-up, because I didn’t want matrix in my handle. 😁 But they’ve got great docs around that (and more) these days; and there’s a good community in the Synapse Admins room too.
I run ejabberd for myself and my family/friend and use conversations on android. Mattermost I would say is the most like discord. I run one of those as well and love it.
I think ejabberd or another other xmpp server would have been my first choice for a service like this by a long shot. If only we had some good iOS clients to go to. While I’m on android, most of the family and some of the friends use iOS, so it was kind of a non-starter from that alone.
Edit: log -> long
Yeah unfortunately iOS is very stingy with battery. Thankfully there’s a few apps that use apples push and ejabberd supports it. I haven’t tested them in a while tho since I’m on android.
Mattermost is great and I’m pretty sure they have an iOS app. I don’t believe the messages are encrypted on MM, but if you’re running the infra it’s not too big of a deal IMHO.
For Matrix, I’d recommend
conduitoversynapse, with the expectation that all of synapse’s features haven’t yet been added (most notably support for spaces, which may or may not be a dealbreaker).It’s incredibly easy to set-up and very lightweight. I never self-hosted synapse due to how resource-heavy it is, and constantly had issues with
dendriteracking up resources as well.conduithas honestly been the easiest thing I’ve self-hosted.What front-end are you running with conduit? I just spent two hours trying to get element to talk to it but i’ve put it off due to so much failure with it.
