this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
125 points (97.7% liked)

Selfhosted

39435 readers
1 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sort of. I host a Matrix Synapse server for about 15 friends. Some of them use rooms on the big Matrix.org server as well, some bridge to Discord and Facebook, and some chat with other smaller groups. By default, Synapse won't sync rooms you haven't joined. It also won't copy files - it'll fetch those I believe (although maybe it'll keep a few days worth of files around?).

After about 5 years of hosting it, we're sitting at 90GB total disc space used, of which ~70GB is the database. You can compress the database and save lots of disc space (50%+) but I haven't gotten around to that yet.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I see why they recommend not using SQLite lol.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

As a protective measure, you could block your local synapse server from federating with matrix.org and that should keep anybody from joining any of the giant rooms on the largest matrix server.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.