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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have a guide/instructions for self-hosting a Matrix server? I'm not sure which server to run, I heard Synapse is a bit heavy and there's a lighter Rust alternative? Which one should I use?

Is it okay to run it at home, or will I lose messages on downtime? I assume other hosts will retry when my connection is back up?

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Synapse is the best bet still and keeps improving. Conduit doesn’t federate yet but looks promising.

https://matrix.org/blog/2020/04/06/running-your-own-secure-c... is a guide I did for selfhosting Synapse.

I installed my homeserver with this!

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

Thank you! Docker will do fine.

I used this Ansible playbook [1] on a Digital Ocean droplet. Very easy to configure, fully-featured.

[1] https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

You don't lose any messages with downtime if others in the group are on different home servers

That sounds great, thanks. Unfortunately I just tried to use Riot.im on the default server to talk to a friend (also on the default server), and my messages aren't getting to him or his to me, so it looks like Matrix still has some way to go.

Use Mozilla's homeserver instead. A far better experience, presumably because it runs on New Vector's modular.im infra. Supports SSO (can even sign in with your Firefox account).

Will that fix things? Apparently, when I tried to DM my friend and invited him to a DM, the room should have been his username but was "empty room" instead.

It may. Riot can be a bit of a pain to get the initial handshake going. If all else fails just keep blowing up the room and retrying until it sticks. I've had to do that before with members of my team.

I see, thanks. I tried with another friend, I keep trying to verify him but I keep seeing a spinner "waiting for him" and he sees nothing.

I'm going to give Matrix a few more years to mature and try again then, I think.

We're not aware of any performance problems on the matrix.org server right now (we had a breakthrough in performance last week), so I think something else is going wrong. What clients were you using?

I was using web and he was using the android client. Things started working when he switched to web too.

precisely which android client was he using? (and can he submit a bug report from it?)

My guess is that you were trying to do new-style verification, which requires RiotX, which is shortly going to replace the old Riot Android client.

I think he was using the old client, yes. I will ask him to file a report, I tried RiotX and it seems to work well.

It's really not that bad or I certainly wouldn't be using it.

The matrix home server has horrible lag spikes at some times of the day.

The e2e implementation was pretty miserable until a few weeks ago but is now pretty smooth sailing.

Been using it for 3-4 years and quite happy.

As of last week the matrix.org homeserver should no longer be laggy, as per https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1265412147737223174 fwiw :)

It has seemed much better but anecdotally I was just about to talk to my friend about how much better Matrix had been in the last few weeks and....

Unusuable between 14:20 and 14:28pst today :)

Is there a public ops page for those perf numbers?

-thanks for fixing e2e, cross signing was huge improvement

hm, weird - not seeing anything around 14:20 on the graphs. might be network connectivity or something else going wrong, but not an overloaded synapse for once.

status.matrix.org exists but is fairly useless - we need to publish the graphs publicly.

Are those new issues due to P2P? I've been using riot for some time last year and everything seemed to "just work". Was I lucky, or did it get worse?

P2P is an entirely separate codebase & deployment. The issues here sound like a bug in the legacy Riot/Android app which is about to be replaced by RiotX. In general things have been getting progressively better.

https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct

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