Comment by bravura | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bravura | Hacker News Reader

Okay, so this project sounds exciting. But it's really hard to figure out what is currently possible and how to get started. (I find this ironic for a project that is focused on improving communication.)

Here is where I am after jumping around the docs for 15 minutes. Can someone with more Matrix experience help?

So as of right now:

* Can I have one app on my iOS device that allows me to seamlessly message people on platforms like messenger and whatsapp and email? (Is there even one 30-60s video clip demo'ing Matrix?)

* Do I need to run my own server to get going? (Public servers are discouraged for auth'ing with my private messages, or that's not even implemented.)

* Can I just plop the docker onto a server and I'm done? I suspect I have to do something with the bridges, but how much?

* Overall, how long will it take me to get running and have satisfaction?

One an end note, I think this project has so much potential, and is potentially killing itself with its super-dev-focused information layout and messaging. We need to get non-technical end-users excited about this project!

Okay I'm going to gripe in my postscripts now:

p.s. This blog post makes the common release announcement mistake of not even telling you what the software does in the first few paragraphs.

p.p.s. "If you want to… Just get started! Then read… [Getting Involved [link]" Really? There's no end-user getting started page? It's a getting involved page where one option is to write my own server?

The simple case, if you just want to use it, is that you go to https://riot.im/app and sign yourself up as a new user. You can talk to other Matrix users, join rooms, and in general use it like any other chat service. Riot is the reference client and you can use it via web, install it as a desktop (electron) app, or install the iOS or Android apps. There are other clients you can use, but for the most part they're all very much in beta.

You can also set up some very simple bridging from within the client that will connect a Matrix room to a room in Slack, Gitter, and IRC. It will basically mirror the contents of (say) a Slack room into a Matrix room and vice versa. This process is pretty much just point-and-click.

The less-simple case is if you want to do "puppet" bridging, where you can control your own Slack, Discord, iMessage, Hangouts, etc. user via Matrix. The people you talk to using those services won't actually know that you're using Matrix; it just sends messages as if they're coming from your account. To do that, you will need your own server and you'll need to run bridge servers. I didn't find it particularly hard to get Synapse (the reference server) up and running, and I don't have much experience with that kind of thing. The time consuming part for me was just learning how to get a TLS certificate and how to set up a reverse proxy in Apache.

Setting up the bridge servers is more of a mixed bag. They're all developed by the community and have differing levels of stability and polish. It will really depend on which ones you want to have set up.

The other comments already gave you some great info, but I'll just link some good documentation for anyone looking to get started. I discovered Matrix the other day and decided to set up a toy matrix-synapse server, which took less than two days' worth of free time for someone with a programming background and no serious IT expertise.

Build matrix-synapse server from source: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse

Install matrix-synapse server on a DO droplet (the smallest/cheapest droplet or excess resources on an existing one should be plenty): https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-inst...

I hope this project gets more traction because it's a fantastic, secure, self-hosted, full-featured, (inhales), open-source version of slack/telegram/kind of discord. Not perfect yet, but really great so far. Even pretty easy to set up e2e-encrypted voice and video calling through your server.

> Build matrix-synapse server from source: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse

Or use a distro that has a binary package, e.g. https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/any/matrix-syna...

Ah, I probably should've mentioned that the DigitalOcean article I linked shows how to install/configure a synapse binary with apt-get.

Matrix is only a protocol. There are some clients listed for it on this page: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html

Whatever you plan to use it for, those projects should have communities of people to help.

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