It has become among the most popular open messaging protocols, but it remains a scalability nightmare.
It's literally the Blockchain of messaging. Its current state is given by the sum of the whole chain of events received since t=0. It's a brittle append-only ledger, and any modifications you do to it are very likely to break it.
Do you have a huge 100GB database and you want to clean up old stuff? Sorry, you can't. There are some non-official solutions for compacting the events, but they're all likely to break your db - and none worked so far in my case.
Do you have users on your instance that entered a busy room on matrix.org? Then you'll get all the join/leave events of that busy room on your db, with no way of deleting them, and nothing to do unless your users exit those rooms.
Did you start your instance by toying with the default SQLite backend, and now that it's become big you want to move to Postgres? Sorry, no official guides provided, only unofficial procedures scattered across a bunch of blogs.
Do you want to change the name of your server? Sorry, you can't. All the events are tightly coupled to your server name. The advised solution is to simply start a new instance.
Such a rigid and brittle implementation shouldn't have become an open de facto standard without much questioning about its poor design decisions.
At the very least, some official tools must be provided to enable admins to compact events. If the size of the database is guaranteed to increase indefinitely, then entry barriers against self-hosting are only going to increase.
The Foundation is pleased to see that, not only do the forked projects remain under an open source license, but Element binds itself, through the CLA, to keeping 3rd party contributions in the open source commons.
(neo)’liberal’ licenses like MIT and BSD that enable corporations to partake of the free labour of others
implying that the #GPL / #AGPL doesn't let corps partake in the free labor of others too> and enclose the commons
Your "open commons" is worthless if it's effectively still proprietary. Case in point: #Mastodon's #ActivityPub extensions that pretty much everybody else have to support (Mastodon is AGPL, and it's not realistic to implement ActivityPub strictly to the spec and expect it to be compatible with Mastodon). Or GNUisms (implemented by #GNU software which are GPL) that #BSD userlands are forced to support. Or #Matrix where there's basically only one server implementation that is usable (#Synapse whichis AGPL). I could go on and on.
I was hoping my #Matrix experience would be better after setting up my own #Synapse and #Element servers, but I think it's worse. It takes 10-15+ minutes to join a room that's on another server.
I really want Matrix to be the federated chat platform that #OpenSource communities (and others) can move to, but we need to somehow solve these latency problems.
So has anyone had experience setting up a #Matrix server using #Synapse? The platform itself seemed pretty straightforward until it got to the part where I needed to configure a mail server. What solutions do people use?
I want desperately to set my own server and ween myself off of Discord soooo badly. 😅
After several years, I'm thinking of ditching my self-hosted Synapse/matrix server and Mastodon servers, as I am the sole user on each. I realized I see very little value now in hosting these with only one user, as it's not worth the log files and storage data that they accumulate. While I love self-hosting at home, I feel federated and social applications make little sense if there's just one person on it - outside of running it as a hobby effort.
I keep returning to the idea of running a #matrix server attached to mastodon.radio
We have an #xmpp server already, but I don't think it gets much use and not many projects host discussions on xmpp these days, and many use matrix so it feels like matrix would be more useful.
However, it is more resource intensive, I'd probably need to spin up a new vps dedicated to running the #synapse matrix server, and I don't want to use donations wastefully. Plus more admin overhead.
Thank you for all the great replies and responses to this poll! It somehwat confirmed my belief that Signal is the goto for most for secure, end to end encrypted chat (which I have used on occasion). But I also learned about other options I had never known about before including many decentralized options. Check out the replies to my poll to see them. #Signal#Matrix#Element#WhatsApp#Telegram#Synapse#Wire#Threema#SecureChat#E2EE#Messaging
I've tried several different guides and scripts and always ran into issues. This was the first one that actually worked rather well for me so if anyone is running into issues, give this a try!
I might finally do a technical stream this weekend. But instead of coding the goal for me will be to set up #Synapse and hook up to the #Matrix. I tried this before but got stuck on the mail server setup step, but I've been told there are other options so I guess we'll give this another go.
Will I finally divorce myself from #Discord? Probably not, but this is a good first step and if I can get this to work, then I can finally delete my server from that cursed network! 😂
Easy way to install Matrix-Synapse (github.com)
I've tried several different guides and scripts and always ran into issues. This was the first one that actually worked rather well for me so if anyone is running into issues, give this a try!