As r/selfhosted seems to have shutdown due to the reddit api changes (rip), I wanted to see if anyone has worked with these services before?
How do they compare to Discord and how hard is it to maintain, as the setup looks pretty in depth for matrix and synapse. How did you convince your user base to use it over Discord.
I’ve hosted TS3 for about 8 years and are looking for alternatives, as we have to use Discord for screen sharing.
Thanks!
I do. I’ve been hosting it for 3 years now. I have seen them add new features rapidly, and it’s pretty exciting, things can (rarely) break sometimes (cause you didn’t read the upgrade notes before upgrading).
They had something called communities, which they scrapped for Spaces. Spaces are more akin to a server on Discord for the most part. I don’t use Discord too much, so there could be some features missing that I have not noticed.
I didn’t intend to bring them to me, I intended to go to them using bridges. If you have a Discord server, investigate how to bridge to that discord server (either personally via double puppeting bridges or maintain a complete copy of the server using relay bridges). This way over time you can bring people over to your matrix instance cause these companies do mess up (at this point its not will its when). Similar with signal, googlechat etc.
It is fun and fairly easy.
There is Spacebar (formerly Fosscord) aiming to be a drop-in discord-compatible replacement. I’m not sure how usuable it is yet, since I haven’t gotten around to try it, but it does look like a promising solution imo.
There’s also revolt.chat which can be self hosted: https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
Mumble in combination with XMPP is the most hassle free and low resource option. Just for small personal use snikket.org XMPP is probably the best.
Matrix Synapse also works, but if you join any large rooms it will blow up ram and storage space usage, thus I can’t really recommend it.
I’ve been hosting it for myself for a couple of years and once you set it up it’s without problems. I wanted to consolidate all my chats like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc. into one UI and the bridges allow me to do that.
Discord has a proprietary license so I never considered it.
Sounds really interesting! Could you please indicate what are you selfhosting exactly in order to achieve this?
- For the server I use synapse and I use their deb package so it upgrades itself with the whole system when I do a
apt upgrade - For the bridges there are different solutions, most of them can be found here https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/setup.html (<- the onel written in go) and https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/python/setup.html (the ones written in python)
- Some bridges you don’t need to host yourself because there are some public ones available via the Element UI
But remember that bridges terminate end to end encryption and there are some pitfalls with that. For some background info you can watch a video I made some time ago: https://tube.jeena.net/w/rYhp4ZT5Ykw1aBGqMr62KG
Thanks a lot for the reply @jeena@jemmy.jeena.net, much appreciated. I’m watching the video right now, thanks for sharing your personal experience on hosting the services and the security considerations, good to know! I was between happy and surprised to see that the video is on PeerTube, way to go, thanks for promoting the Fediverse. 👍
Not 100% sure if I want to go through this hole now 🤣
- For the server I use synapse and I use their deb package so it upgrades itself with the whole system when I do a
This is really interesting to hear, never thought of these services allowing enough access to effectively use something self-hosted for consolidation. Will definitely look into it!
Check out rocket.chat
It is what my company uses. It is free and open source. Same features as Discord. Not too difficult to setup.
My partner and I self-host a matrix server + element frontend locally, and we are both in a few federated chats with people and organizations elsewhere.
We mostly stood it up to replace a discord server that we were using for communication, organization, and home automation in anticipation of API/policy changes on Discord’s end. For that application it has worked really well and it’s a lot easier to integrate with software that spams log or alert data.
I personally prefer a self - hosted Revolt instance. It’s not federated or anything, but it’s fast and nearly identical to Discord with some extra nice features, and it has a first party docker container so it’s extremely easy to set up. I didn’t go with Matrix or anything like that because it’s harder to set up a natural system where you have a server, but then that server has many channels, and that’s very important to how my friend group communicates and hangs out.
Are there any plans for Revolt to federate? I gave it a quick search and had no luck
Official statement:
Short Answer
We don’t think federation is beneficial to Revolt and would actively hinder our stance on privacy. In short, federation is prone to leaking your metadata, could make removing your data harder, and we otherwise have no incentive to develop support if it we aren’t able to use it for the main platform (revolt.chat).
In terms of technical reasons:
- We don’t have the manpower or resources to implement federation into our protocol.
- It would be difficult to adopt our protocol to work with federation.
Source with full answer: https://developers.revolt.chat/faq/federation
I’m running a mumble and a conduit server currently, and I’m not planning to ever touch shitcord again ^^
I run ejabberd for myself and my family/friend and use conversations on android. Mattermost I would say is the most like discord. I run one of those as well and love it.
I think ejabberd or another other xmpp server would have been my first choice for a service like this by a long shot. If only we had some good iOS clients to go to. While I’m on android, most of the family and some of the friends use iOS, so it was kind of a non-starter from that alone.
Edit: log -> long
Prosody here in addition to Matrix. :)
To echo what others have said, I’ve been running a personal/friends only matrix server for about a year, and have found it, though difficult at first, to be stable enough to use as a universal messenger combining discord, messenger, WhatsApp and others in one app. It’s very convenient.
There was a post recently about this. It was called revolt
Yeah, revolt looks nice and is clearly trying to be a drop in replacement for discord, so that will make adoption easier.
However it doesn’t seem ready yet. The client notes that their voice chat feature is in the middle of being re-written from scratch. The legacy voice chat just doesn’t work for me (on Linux). Discord isn’t great on Linux, but it’s more usable that revolt right now.
Also, for better or worse, it’s not actually federated, it’s just open source. So there is a central revolt server that new users automatically use, and if you want to operate elsewhere, as far as I can tell, you effectively modify the client to reference a different server.
I run a non-federated Matrix server for my family with synapse, it’s behind nginx and the setup is pretty straightforward if you know what you’re doing. It does chat, voice, and video with screenshare nicely, though I don’t know now well it scales to a large group.
I’ve been running a synapse server for a few years using https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
I’d highly recommend the above Ansible playbook as it makes it easy to manage not only synapse but also to manage a bunch of bridges and bots if you have the need for them. I have a bunch of rooms that are bridged to Slack for my bozo friends that refuse to use a cool open-source alternative.
For Matrix, I’d recommend
conduitoversynapse, with the expectation that all of synapse’s features haven’t yet been added (most notably support for spaces, which may or may not be a dealbreaker).It’s incredibly easy to set-up and very lightweight. I never self-hosted synapse due to how resource-heavy it is, and constantly had issues with
dendriteracking up resources as well.conduithas honestly been the easiest thing I’ve self-hosted.What front-end are you running with conduit? I just spent two hours trying to get element to talk to it but i’ve put it off due to so much failure with it.
There’s a couple I use: element (desktop & mobile), gomuks, nheko, and fluffychat.
I’m assuming you followed the deploy walkthrough? That should work pretty well on its own, but there might be some weird networking issues you could be having. First try running conduit once set up in the foreground to make sure it starts without issue, then try the health check listed in the instructions:
$ curl https://your.server.name/_matrix/client/versions # If using port 8448 $ curl https://your.server.name:8448/_matrix/client/versionsIf it fails here, I’d recommend stopping by their matrix room with another account. The room is active and helpful; I greatly appreciated the help I got in setting up my homeserver with a subdomain + pretty homeserver name i.e. without the subdomain. As conduit is still early in development it’d probably be good to have a backup account on matrix.org or another smaller homeserver (preferably the latter given how overloaded the former is).
I run a single user matrix instance to join some chat rooms. Works great for me.
