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Comment by jagermo | Hacker News Reader

I'm thinking of setting up a Matrix instance for my kids and their friends to chat. However, Synapse might be a bit of overkill, I don't need (actually want) things like federation. I saw Conduit (conduit.rs) a few months ago, does anyone have experience with using it for a small community?

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I swapped to caddy + conduit after running traefik + synapse in a docker container. Not having to deal with postgres db upgrades and docker is nice.

It is a little bit buggier because clients dont always adhere to the spec.

I'm sticking with conduit, but I wouldn't recommend it yet unless every user is ok with random bugs.

edit: I should say I've run conduit for a few months and before that we used synapse for maybe 2 years

If you are not adamant on using the Matrix protocol, Snikket (XMPP) is very easy to set up. Server runs in a docker container with auto-renewing certificates, has an invite/create account page and an admin console.

Conduit is beta, but probably works quite well in an unfederated environment. That said, these days Synapse is also lightweight in an unfederated environment while also being production grade, and it’s easy to turn off federation. Were it me, i’d grab Synapse and be done with it, so as to avoid playing dodge with any beta issues.

yeah, you are probably right.

This is my exact use case. I disabled federation, hand out account tokens to my kids' friends so they can make their own accounts (public registration is disabled). I used that popular Synapse Ansible deploy project, and deployed it on the cheapest Hetzner VPS. Been running flawlessly for over a year now.

Probably better to use Dendrite matrix for that. That one is pretty close to fully working and uses less resources.

I'll look into it.

Synapse is very lightweight now.

I recommend using it because it gets the latest features as they are released, like VOIP calls instead of crappy Jitsi, etc.

Matrix is still heavily under development, so you want to be using the reference/most active implementation of the protocol.

You can stop federation too.

Haven't used conduit in a while but Dendrite (written in Go) has most features that you would need. Well conduit does too but last time I checked them out they were switching databases again.

There's a really well-made ansible playbook that deploys synapse and pretty much anything you would ever want for you, highly recommend it

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