this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Honestly when I used Signal it felt like a middle compromise between not using Whatsapp without ditching a lot of people. Nowadays I don't have the patience for that. I just keep minimal usage of Whatsapp for some family and friends and moved to my own Matrix instance. You even have bridges so convenience is great.
Also I remember Moxie being totally against the redistribution of Signal outside their own channels (no Fdroid) and refusing some improvements for battery life where your phone didn't have GSF for notifications.
Do you mind if I ask how you set up your own matrix instance? What software did you use? Are you hosted in the cloud or a home lab type setup? Sorry for so many questions but I've been wanting to do this for a while now
I run on a rented VPS but I guess you could do it in a home lab just for your family too or whatever.
Personally I think is better to redirect you to the Synapse docs, they are pretty well written and if you have any sysadmin experience it should be pretty easy to setup, they are even packaged by many Linux distributions:
https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/latest/setup/installation.html
I followed an old and possibly outdated video guide.
I don’t very limited Holman stuff, but I was able to buy my first domain, vps, and host this all for the first time in about a solid day of work.
I’m guessing if I had to redo it I could possibly do it a bit faster.
Sorry in advance I don’t have a link to the video, but it was done by the guy who is the main guy behind it or the main guy behind element.
I would also recommend the Matrix-Docker-Ansible-Deploy playbook for setting up a Matrix server. It supports Synapse (the "mainline" server implementation), Conduit, and Dendrite as the actual homeserver backend.
It does take a while to go through the sheer number of options they have available, but it makes it incredibly easy to spin up a Matrix server, as well as update one. I haven't setup any bridges with it, but its nice to know that it also supports a great deal of them, and can just be toggled on through the playbook settings.
The documentation is also fantastic, and there's a massive community in case you run into any trouble with it.
Have you considered using a relay for whatsapp? I like that I have all my accounts in one app now.
Yeah I have used mautrix-whatsapp for a long time. In fact I used to push updates for the alpine package.
But recently I ditched some stuff on my VPS to free resources for other services and that bridge was sacrificed haha