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Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of my time on TF2 servers when I was a kid. Everyone knew everyone on our main server and it was a community. It's something that discord doesn't a decent job at capturing today, but unfortunately not selfhosted. Matrix is interesting, but I'm waiting for their new Go implementation (dendrite?). The deployment for matrix feels like it's heavier than it should be. I feel like I should be able to spin up a process and point to the port and call it a day. Maybe the overhead is from the need for authentication for federation, but I personally don't care about federation for my purposes.

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This sounds like what you need: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

I don't know anything about ansible, or much about docker, or self hosting. And I was able to set it up and it's working quite well for my family and friends. You don't have to enable federation. Set federation_domain_whitelist to an empty list, and poof, federation disabled.

DNS settings are pretty easy too - especially if you can allow your instance to take control over an entire domain (and don't have to host other web services other than what the playbook supports). Don't need the SRV stuff here: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/b...

If you just have a private server for < 100 users, 1 vCPU and 2GB RAM is enough. I also use it for bridging to IRC using heisenbridge (which the playbook supports) and it's no problem on the tiny server.

Updates are very easy, pull the latest playbook, and run setup again. Done.

> Matrix is interesting, but I'm waiting for their new Go implementation (dendrite?). The deployment for matrix feels like it's heavier than it should be. I feel like I should be able to spin up a process and point to the port and call it a day.

Sounds like you, like me, have had your brain broken by the ease of deploying Go programs :) The current Synapse server is written in Python, so it's a bit of a trial. That said, I run it on a tiny linode instance and it Just Works after maybe an hour of fiddling around (I seem to remember something about DNS records being the fiddliest part to get right).

There are repos for debian/ubuntu so its just matter of adding the repo and doing apt install. You have to make config for synapse but you have to do it everywhere. You can use sqlite instead of postgres. It will go surprisingly far and you don't have to install postgres :).

The only time Synapse starts to get heavy is if you federate with lots of massive rooms. If you don't federate it should be absolutely fine.

Dendrite is never going to ship, and if it does, it will never really have parity with Synapse. Mark my words.

*Citation needed

But also, I am not sure that "parity with Synapse" is necessarily required or desirable. Sure, it needs to be fully functional and handle all the basic federatable communications, but its not like most small scale self-hosters need/want all the enterprise features being packed into Synapse. I think it is better for the Matrix ecosystem to have various server implementation that target different segments but can all still communicate.

Do you not think it's in the best interest of Element Matrix Services to ship Dendrite? Presumably it would reduce their cost of operations significantly ...

Dendrite shipped 0.4.0 2 weeks ago, and 0.4.1 ships today (with a 10x speed-up in state resolution performance). Meanwhile it passes 92% of the server-server matrix compliance test suite (sytest) and 61% of client-server.

I'd expect us to ship 1.0 once these numbers hit 100%, which at the current rate should be before end of the year.

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