GitHub - spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy: 🐳 Matrix (An open network for secure, decentralized communication) server setup using Ansible and Docker

🐳 Matrix (An open network for secure, decentralized communication) server setup using Ansible and Docker - spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

GitHub (github.com)

Honestly, with this, it is easier than ever. Great documentation !

The UI is not that important. Something a bit similar to Discord in appearance and experience is doable in plenty of available UI toolkits and libraries and frameworks and whatever.

The system itself is important, so that it would be functional with federation, yet not as prone to fragmentation as XMPP, yet efficient.

I swear there were calls when I was testing it a year or two ago. Guess not then.

Isn't everything a pain to selfhost?

A large part of it is the obnoxious monetization and general enshittification and privacy violations, but that's not all. There are a number of usability annoyances. If I've been away from Discord for a little while and try to continue where I left off in a thread on a server, it never properly preserves where I last stopped reading. There are often times when I get notifications but it won't actually take me to the relevant message, and that can even result in situations where the ping just gets lost entirely.

Then there's things inherent in Discord's design and how people use it. It's become a tool that people have decided is a convenient replacement for chats, wikis, and forums - but it's a shittier version of all of those things. Pinned messages are such a tucked away and half-baked feature. The fact that people are using Discord both to organize and discuss projects - as well as using that same space to host documentation or other critical knowledge-bases has made information significantly less accessible. I don't want to join someone's niche club just to "learn more." If I want to read something I would rather just go to a wiki on the actual open web.

Discord is hot garbage ultimately for the same reasons as Facebook. It's trying to be everything to everyone, and dropping a black box on the open web by doing so. It's just another example of people trading convenience for actually using the appropriate tools for the kind of job they're trying to do.

Problem is then you miss important info, for example if friends are talking about a game server they're running and post the connection details, or if they plan an event with a location and time to meet, if you don't have a bouncer and were offline then you can't see those messages.

Don't get your hopes up, I deleted my account on matrix.org because of that same spam, and there's no way to mass ignore invites to the hundreds of rooms from all the spam accounts they let run rampant.

It's gonna be like 100 years before Matrix and the clients are in a good place at this rate. It only seems to be getting worse right now with more fragmented clients and servers with more and more spam issues, and the performance just keeps getting worse too.

Even their very own Element app is being retired and replaced by Element X which is missing a ton of features.

They still don't have any of the features people coming from Discord/TS/Mumble are expecting like voice chat rooms, push to talk, or streaming to a room. They don't have the features Telegram users are expecting like stickers, threads inside groups, read only channels, and so on..

The vast majority of users have no reason to switch since it's nothing like the apps they are used to. And it's buggy and slow on top of that.

Most things are super easy, like 2-5 minutes of set up and it's running and working.

Such as?

I had such a pain trying to get a consistent client working on mobile.

Most of the stuff I run on my server is just a basic docker-compose.yaml file and it's up and running in a minute or two. Some random examples:

• Immich
• Peertube
• Pinchflat
• Vaultwarden
• Mealie

So, going from Mealie's instructions, having to learn how to work with Docker, whatever underlying server you're working with, and a database system is easy 2-5 minutes?

You need to learn some Docker stuff initially for sure, but the underlying OS can be anything including Windows which is why Docker is nice.

The database for Mealie is part of the app already and is handled automatically, with the SQLite docker-compose file they provide.

Take this with a grain of salt, I don't have it deployed right now, but if I remember the current state correctly, one on one calls are a thing, group calls aren't.

IRC doesnt fit the requirements though. I cant send pictures or videos, I cant make little icons to react, I cant quote reply, I dont get push notifications when pinged. You may think these arent nessesary but to majority of users they are and I dont think IRC is going to adapt to include them.

Honestly, setting up things using Docker Compose is generally a question of copying and pasting and editing the file locations.

The moment you need SSL and/or a reverse proxy it becomes a bit more complex, but once you set up a reverse proxy once you can generally expand that to your other applications.

Something like a Synology nas makes it very easy and to some extend even the Truenas apps are kinda easy.

I did not enjoy finding out only at the end that the images in this blog post are generated/made using AI.

Most of the modern clients agree on the core set and thus interoperate fine for most normal things.

So you think it is a sane solution to mark essential features as optional extensions and then have a wink-wink, nudge-nudge agreement of which of these "optional" extensions are actually mandatory? Instead of having essential features be part of the core protocol?

But more importantly, XMPP sucks because it does not have one back-end implementation like Vodozemac for Matrix. So let alone being unable to have security audits, you are forcing client developers to roll their own implementation of the e2ee, with likely little to no experience with cyber-security, and just hoping they will make no mistakes. You know, implementing encryption that even experts have hard time getting right.