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Comment by rabbitofdeath | Hacker News Reader

I love matrix - I've been running a Synapse homeserver for over 2 years now for friends and family. We love it. Despite minor problems (upgrading postgres for example) it has been smooth sailing. I really want to stay up to date but they don't make it easy! I'd love to add sliding-sync to my existing docker stack, but I feel like I'm in way over my head!

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I love the idea of matrix (synapse + element + mobile apps) and I have started moving my family there too but we had so many problems with notifications not being sent to the phone unless you actively open the app.

There is a huge discussion about that on git and some can't reproduce, some can't get a single notification even though the apps notification checkmarks were all green.

So it had a very very low WAF [1] and I scrapped it sadly. This was a few years ago, any signs of these problems still existing?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_acceptance_factor

I had this problem 2 years ago and it ended getting fixed. Recently I seen it again and the problem was that my container running synapse did not have working DNS which caused all notifications to stop working. Once I fixed up resolv.conf all was working.

I am not suggesting that was your issue but it might help somebody.

Hmm… we haven’t had notification problems like that in many years, from memory. Any idea if this was trying to deliver push notifs to Android without using Google? (Which historically has been painful thanks to Android OS versions terminating the app in the bg).

Element X has totally rewritten notification code (given it’s moved from Kotlin to Rust) and should be much more robust for bugs like this.

Sorry you got bitten by it.

Communicating via Apple or Google is sadly required these days. How does that work with matrix? Does the protocol specify how to trigger those notifications? Do I need to register for a Google API key when setting up the server? I can't recall seeing anything about that in the configuration file.

https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2016/12/11/riots-magical-push-n... is a great blog (back when Element was called Riot) explaining how it works :)

The gist of it seems to be that Synapse/Dendrite calls home to the Matrix Company, which in turn pays Google to send a notification. That's awfully nice of them, but does not really leave any room for success. I take it larger clients with security requirements roll their own clients, and this is part of the business case?

It’s more that “whoever built your client has the keys to send push to it, so your synapse calls home to them.” And yes, that means that paranoid types need their own clients, and that is indeed a service that Element offers.

Doesn't the use of ntfy change this (Android only, I think)? Homeserver pushes to an ntfy topic, app on phone is listening to that topic. Of course, this just moves the intermediary to ntfy but you can also host a different ntfy server which I hope element supports.

It does. I use ntfy with a ntfy server on one of my VPSs, and I use the official ntfy account on GMS as an intermediary.

It works fine, but I'll probably switch back to Matrix's push server at some point.

Edit: With Synapse + Element, obviously.

Thanks for sharing. Are you switching back because of pricing, or reliability issues?

Just to clarify that... I'm pretty sure the notification doesn't actually contain any of the message though, it's just a notification to check the server for new messages.

Element supports UnifiedPush. My Prosody server forwards my notifications to me via the Cheogram app.

>Communicating via Apple or Google is sadly required these days.

The copy of Signal installed on my GrapheneOS Pixel (with no Google anything installed) begs to differ; notifications have been both low-latency and rock-solid.

So it absolutely _can_ be done, and done well.

If any of those are android users, it may be down to the non-android standards friendly battery optimisation the manufacturer ship their devices with (e.g. Samsung, Huawei, OnePlus, Xiamoi, etc.)

https://dontkillmyapp.com/

I've had more issues with missing notifications on my OnePlus than I ever had on my Pixel (I have list of reasons why I'll never buy Google hardware again, mostly coming down to their support). Most issues get fixed by me persuading OnePlus to stop applying their secret sauce to power control

Not disagreeing you, just adding a point...I self-host Conduit and use FluffyChat on my phone, with ntfy for push notifications. While that works great most of the time, I occasionally have to restrict ntfy because it'll get into some state where it destroys my battery... And push notifications obviously don't work at all in that state.

It's very unfortunate there isn't a privacy-friendly push notification mechanism built into Android that doesn't ruin battery life. Or iOS for that matter; that might actually be a feature that would get me to switch.

> There is a huge discussion about that on git

Git doesn’t have discussions??

You probably just need to change the settings to battery saver - no restrictions for Element. Your OS is probably killing the app aggressively (I've seen this with telegram a lot as well with many people).

It might be difficult to switch at this point, but I highly recommend matrix-docker-ansible-deploy[0]. Enabling sliding-sync is one config entry.

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

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