No weird opinions, you do you and if Matrix suits your needs, great. In general I like the idea and concept behind Matrix, was a bit clunky to get it going initially but afterwards, with Continuiwity as backend server I have to say I ran quite smooth. I guess for a small homelab/self hosted setup with maybe a hand full of users, XMPP sounds easier to maintain. But I guess I’ll have to find out, probably going to deploy Snikket or Ejabberd for a test run.
Only heard great things about it
Can’t speak for the Synapse hosting, as back when I hosted one myself I directly started with Dendrite (was not really that feature rich) and switched to Continuiwity soon after. And I have to agree, ran like a charm on my VPS and didn’t use a ton of resources. Granted, I was the only user so can’t say how the usage would have increased with more users active.
Yeah that’s the thing with a lot of these platforms, it’s dead simple for most people to download the app and create the account. You already loose two thirds (if not more) of the people as soon as the sign up process gets a bit more complicated, even more if they have to manage and secure any kind of secret (encryption keys) themselves. Not that it would be so difficult to save this stuff in a password manager, but I guess that’s already where a lot of people still fall short… What a uphill battle that was (still is) with some of my friends and family to get them to use a password manager for a start.
Couldn’t agree more with the first two points, especially the second one when it comes to adaptability by my non-techy friends and especially the wife-approval-factor.
I only tried out Delta Chat like two years ago linking it to a secondary Gmail account. Don’t think this really fully utilized it to its full potential. What do you like most so far about Delta Chat?
Nice blog post you wrote there, I like how you go into some details about the problems you faced hosting Matrix.
Used some of the Mautrix bridges (WhatsApp & Signal) in an attempt to combine all my messaging apps on the phone into one single app. Worked reasonably well I have to say.
The Discord bridge I never tried, mostly because my friend group is not really using the instant messaging part of Discord. We more or less only use it for voice chat while gaming or just some shit talking. Thinking about it, for this a TeamSpeak or Mumble server would probably be enough to replace our Discord usage 😄
You can actually change these ports if you run Snikket behind a reverse proxy according to their advanced configuration docs. But yeah, probably going with something else than Snikket as it doesn’t really suite into my current Podman/Traefik setup. At least not without a lot of tinkering which I don’t feel like at the moment 😅