Came across this on the r/selfhosted community. Still very much in the alpha stages, but it’s already got a Docker image you can try out for yourself, or try out the demo server.
Tried it earlier today, couldn’t get the voice/video chat to work right away on my self-hosted setup but the real-time chat was very snappy. Looks promising.
I admit i mostly use matrix as an instant messenger, but it works fine for when i need comms with my friends while gaming or when i want to share my screen for something. My university also has its own deployment so all the people around me automatically have an account anyway, which makes it easy to set up groupchats.
Sure it still has some jank to it, but if you look at how janky it used to be even just a year ago, the trajectory is pretty clear to me. Its a very ambitious project that arguably tried to do too much at once in its early days, but i think its here to stay and its only gonna get better. If its not good enough for you today, then just wait another year or two until it is. Its not going away because its being used basically everywhere at this point. Government, healthcare, military, university, private industry, schools, etc.
Fair cop, sounds useful, and I have used it in the past for similar. I was however looking at it in the context of Selfhosted.
True, and I have good hopes for it, partly because of the adoption, you will however note the scale of your examples, basically it’s an IT department project rather than a set and forget selfhosted container (I recognize there’ll always be moderation to do). We shall see, I’m in no hurry.
I see. I havent selfhosted any matrix servers yet, so i havent looked into it too much. But yeah its kind of an intimidating process to set these up when i look at the guides. I know that there are a few server implementations besides synapse that are mature and stable (and supposedly much more resource efficient) and they do support docker deployment. All of these including synapse can however be run on a raspberry pi so there isnt really any big requirements other than keeping it up to date and doing backups of your databases.
https://forgejo.ellis.link/continuwuation/continuwuity
https://github.com/matrix-construct/tuwunel