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Comment by profsnuggles | Hacker News Reader

It's probably on the front page because of the Prosody post that is on the front page. Matrix is on the front page because it's really the only open protocol that has a chance of gaining non-technical users.

I run a matrix server, which has been nothing but a constant pain. My friends that use it can also use my ircv3 server or xmpp server that I run that use no resources and take up none of my time with maintenance. They do not. The only thing I've run that they like better so far is mattermost. I don't like the open core though. Matrix, xmpp and irc are backed by ldap which is impossible with mattermost.

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I remember I spent about 10 minutes looking into setting up my own Matrix server. Seemed like a good day of work, and then I would still need to figure out how to support media uploads and E2E.

The real kicker is that having the data on my own server is certainly nice, but I just don't think it's less likely to be exposed while I'm holding it vs someone else. I remember when everyone had a self-hosted WordPress blog. Eventually you'd get tired of applying patches every 2 weeks and instantly get added to a bot farm. No thank you.

To be fair installing synapse is fairly easy. Media uploads and e2e should "just work". When I recently changed the VPS I was running it on I set up synapse from scratch in about 15 minutes. Of course I have set up synapse many times.

You're right. Just found these directions here and it seems far simpler than whatever I was looking at months ago:

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md

If your XMPP server is Prosody check out the new invitation feature to help people sign up: https://blog.prosody.im/great-invitations/

If they're people who want a web client you can look at mod_conversejs: https://modules.prosody.im/mod_conversejs - but it is not as comprehensive a web client as Element, in my opinion.

I asked this in the other comment, what is your server specs and user base? Constant pain as in moderation or server breaking ?

Well I was running it on a 2GB VPS, I have since November switched to a 4GB VPS, no issues since then but it's still early days. I haven't benchmarked either VPS, the 2GB I had a single dedicated CPU core, some 3.5+ghz xenon. I didn't check what my cpu allotment was on the new VPS, it was a $65 a year black friday thing. Moderation is not an issue, I only have 5 users other than myself.

Here is the last time I complained about matrix. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25100873

I saw your comment and considered posting a facetious comment about how you would need 80TB of ram and at least twice as much disk space.... but that would add nothing to the discussion.

I think you definitely should try PostgreSQL

I am using postgresql now. That is not a silver bullet for anything though. I switched to postgresql early on (when I first started using matrix I think synapse only supported sqlite?) and I've had less disk space & memory trouble using sqlite than I have postgresql.

Of course I was using sqlite when there weren't nearly as many users as there are today or when I had federation disabled.

If that ID the case with you, what is the specs of servers running matrix.org? How can they scale so much?

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