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!
Matrix (synapse) + element-web works for me, although I didn’t get many people on board.
Mumble is what I use the most, with 2-10 users - it’s primarily for VoIP/gaming comms, but also has basic text chat. Text messages are not persistent though, and there is no web interface, only desktop/mobile clients.
For pragmatism, I just use Signal (not self-hosted) because it is at least partly FOSS, looks reasonably secure/private, and the UX is good enough so I could get people to use it.
I recommend checking out dendrite instead of synapse since it is more lightweight.
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.
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.
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.
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).