Ekte has the Draupnir bot as a $3 add on. It does the job, I only Federated and set the server to public after having the bot. I am paying for the service until I can fully figure out the deployment and then do it on a small cloud provider not in the US. I have run into a few unexpected problems that would have downed a deployment if I was at the helm. I don't think you can deploy on prem because it has a lot of edge requests for federation. I left it uncached for a week and had 300 000 requests. Remember with discord it is centralized and Discord is covering the cost of voice and video traffic, which it pays for by selling you as the product and Nitro. When you decentralize, everyone now has to handle the cost of traffic separately to build the network. The price of the fully managed server is less than the 4 Nitro subs we were using on the Discord server. I don't think enough people remember using Vent, Mumble, and Teamspeak at the same time depending on which group of people your were with. Back then we had to pay fot a Teamspeak server, but TS is not Federated and has a lot of friction for new users, that is why Discord did so well.

Best thing would be paying for hosting. That comes with an admin interface and the ability to add bots and bridges. With admin access you have all the power you need

https://matrix.org/ecosystem/hosting/ has recommended hosting solutions. I can recommend https://etke.cc/order/

Without admin access, any reports dont go to you but server admins of the public instance and if you're on matrix.org instance, moderation can take a while. Hence the recommendation. With 800 people, you should be able to get enough donations to pay 40€/month on etke.cc or something else.

https://matrix-community-help.codestorm.net/

@u_tamtam “most centralized decentralized network” that award goes to Bluesky.I myself use Matrix via FluffyChat on mobile, iamb on desktop, the Fedora project’s server, and chat with a bunch of self-hosted servers. Obviously Element’s products have the highest profile, they are a company and they pay for advertising. But don’t discount the community-developed clients, servers, and instances. They are all fantastic. If anything, this showcases the strength of open protocols and open source: Element can go ahead and make their for-profit, closed-source server, but that doesn’t impede the community’s independence one bit. Yes, matrix.org is quite centralized but the reality is I can have encrypted conversations with matrix.org users without a matrix.org account and that is a story of success.

Matrix is the most centralised "decentralised" network I know of. You have practically only one server implementation, you have almost one client implementation, by the same people, who also happen to be the ones engaged with standardising the protocol, which quite amazingly never really is up to date with the client/server. The same group also maintains a closed source rust version competing with the open source one, and administers the enormous central node at matrix.org whose federation is so often broken. For a decade plus of efforts, I'm very not impressed and it seems clearer and clearer that people are getting tired of forever waiting for Matrix to be good at anything.

This had me have a look at commet, gosh is it bad. On desktop it's unbearably slow. On Android it crashed as soon as it had to display a notification. We are still very far from a healthy Matrix ecosystem of independent client/server implementations.

A friend of mine who's running synapse recommended this

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Nope, because 1) I'm running tuwunel so not much synapse experience and 2) I just use NixOS so my whole operating system sort of is a deployment/updating script...

I did mention an admin gui but idk the name. Should be easy to find. Very popular.

Do you have any quality of life recommendations for Synapse? Like DevOps / Self Maintenance stuff -- e.g., auto-update, control centers, deployment scripts, plugins/modules if they exist, anything else? :-D

Thanks. Glad I could help. Tuwunel is actually a fork of conduwuit, just like continuwuity is; conduwuit itself being a fork of conduit. I originally started with continuwuity but went to tuwunel early on after some problem I forget (probably a bad update or something). Yeah, they can have some problems sadly. But they tend to be lighter on runtime resources. Personally, if I could start over, I'd just roll with synapse.

This is pretty good. One point I wasn't sure if I should go with https://forgejo.ellis.link/continuwuation/continuwuity or install Synapse from Github. But if you mention Element / Synapse, then that sounds good. Thanks!

Don't use a subdomain for your server name; you can delegate a subdomain via well-known endpoint for the real server if needed in the future but this lets users keep a clean domain.com for their contact.

Synapse / Element are the go-to, maybe unfortunately; most other things lack features or use outdated deps. I run a Cinny webapp locked to my HS so people can easily try it out, which is a nice-to-have; but most end up installing Element when they adopt Matrix. (Personally I run fluffychat for mobile and Tuwunel server (forked tuwunel<-conduwuit<-conduit) but they can be a pita. Just stick to the defacto standard stuff)

Docker or Nix trivializes setup configuration. Similarly, Caddy is a cheat code for managing SSL, reverse proxy, and endpoint hosting.

If you use synapse, there's a handy admin webui thing people use which is highly encouraged by the sounds of it.

The biggest friction point is usually setting up TURN/STUN for VoIP etc. Massive pita but a using a VPS may help you a lot there if that's something you need (being behind NAT makes it very difficult and risky).

Make sure you use registration tokens so your server is private (this is usually the default I think)

Do you have any more specific questions or concerns?

"Nothing to show for it". Sure, only a few EU governments switching to it or building on top of it. Otherwise, nothing.

Donate to Matrix now that they have spent tens of millions with nothing to show for them, and got cut loose from their investors as a consequence. Sure. Whatever to keep the grift going.

Matrix is a protocol. Pick a different server and it's a non-issue.

However, it’s important to note that server admins are still subject to the law in the jurisdiction where they operate.

Practically speaking, that means that people and organisations running a Matrix server with open registration must verify the ages of users in countries which require it. Last summer we announced a series of changes to the terms and conditions of the Matrix.org homeserver instance, to ensure UK-based users are handled in alignment with the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA). Since then Australia, New Zealand and the EU have introduced similar legislation, with movement in the US and Canada too. If you’ve been around for a while, you will have seen that we started raising the alarm about the dangers and potential risks of the OSA back in 2021 - but the reality is that these laws already apply, and the consequences of getting it wrong are serious.

Also age verification stuff is the fault of governments at the core. Governments force companies to do age verification but dont specify how or that it should be secure and private.

TL;DR if you want a drop in replacement, it's not Matrix - yet! Donate to give people the means to make it so .

All of these have significant tradeoffs.

You're commenting in a thread about tradeoffs in Matrix so I'm not sure what your point is. Mine was that those particular tradeoffs don't exist in other messengers.

So much so that i would not recommend them to normies

LOL what? Why not?

All of these have significant tradeoffs. So much so that i would not recommend them to normies, except for maybe Briar.

I mean unencrypted platforms aren't perfect either but the vast majority of the time it's perfectly fine or very good. Maybe you have a connectivity issue.

Do you not have these problems with Matrix as well?

At least for me it destroys image quality and calls are terribly over compressed, audio is painful to me. That's explicitly why I stopped using it as a default and am looking for others.

I'm glad you find it good at least, as it's better than crap like Facebook Messenger, but I can't stand it as they run it now.

I mean Signal is not my favorite but it's consistently easy to use and problem-free.

Name the apps please, I'd like alternatives that don't overly compress my media or calls, restrict the type file files I send or the size.

Seriously. I'm low on options here, and I loathe systems that mess with my stuff without my asking it to.