That's right. And the community replies with a smug "you can set it up yourself".
And yet setting a full Matrix stack requires days of work and endless maintenance.
I'd rather use Briar or even Signal.
And yet setting a full Matrix stack requires days of work and endless maintenance.
I'd rather use Briar or even Signal.
This is not true. People, don't let this FUD scare you.
My home server has been running for more than a year, was easy to setup (reading documentation took the most time) and takes little maintenance. Just apt update && apt upgrade.
Edit: and even if reading the documentation takes you 'days of work', you can follow a video of the server being setup in 30 minutes, including a jitsi instance for video conferencing: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/04/06/running-your-own-secure-c...
- buy a VM
- buy a domain
- configure DNS
- apt-get install
- fiddle with SSL certificates
- debug out a memory leak bug
- ask upstream and be told to use an unstable alpha release
- implement a workaround
- start investigating bridges for IRC, Slack, Telegram
- give up
In 2020 we should expect something like Briar:
- install Briar on your ws / phone. There is are no servers. Done.
It is not representative though. You do need a server and a domain name, but that isn't out of place when hosting internet based services like a chat server.
That avoids most of the need for domain, DNS configuration, SSL and SSL certificates.
A centralized chat server e.g. IRC runs on a raspberry.
Briar, as I said, runs without servers and provides also blogs and forums.