this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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I've never tried Matrix but I've heard good things about it.
It's not as snazzy as Discord but it's fully open-source and federated. So everyone can run their own server (I do, too). If you don't care about running your own you can just sign up at https://app.element.io/ . It's free of course. It basically is for chat what lemmy and mastodon are to social media.
It also offers many "bridges" to other protocols, like WhatsApp, Telegram, even Discord. Those are not quite as mature and mostly third-party provided but they generally work well.
There's a really great ansible playbook for installing your own. If you would like to have the full bridged experience, beeper is probably best.
Thanks! I'll have to see if there's Docker containers available. Ansible is definitely doable too, but I prefer Docker. I'll stick it on the same server I'm running Lemmy and Mastodon on :)
Actually the ansible playbook creates a bundle of docker containers so you get the best of both :)
Ahh... Interesting!
Do you know how much RAM it needs? I have a spare VPS with 9GB RAM - is that sufficient? I could run it in a VM on my home server instead, too.
Yeah for sure. I run the server + a bunch of bridges (whatsapp, signal, telegram, chatgpt) on an old atom NUC with 8GB RAM and it only actually uses 2 GB.
Here's the documentation for the playbook: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
I can really recommend it. It takes some reading to set it up because it's insanely configurable. But in the end I have a config file with like 20 statements in it and that sets it all up and keeps it up to date.
Just tried out that playbook to set up a staging server, and it works pretty well.
I feel like it's a bit too magical though. I like knowing how all the software I'm using is installed and configured, and introducing another layer of abstraction makes that harder. I have particular ways things like my web server (Nginx), database servers, Let's Encrypt (certbot), etc are configured and want to keep things that way. I think I'll just use the Ansible playbook for the staging server, and set up the real server using the Docker containers directly, based on documentation from the upstream projects (Synapse, etc)
It looks like they have both Docker containers and Debian packages avaliable, so I'll have to see if it's worth using the Debian packages instead.
That's true. They actually stopped supporting Nginx recently which really bothered me too because I want to keep using self-signed certs (my server is only reachable internally and I do not want to expose it to the internet). And the new server they use (I forgot which) didn't really have that option. So right now I'm locked out from updating until I fix that.
And yes it is totally feasible to use upstream! Not a problem at all.
I would recommend to use the dockers though, as the whole debian thing becomes a bit of a mess with different python requirements for some of the bridges. I tried that in a long forgotten past and there is a reason I'm trying to forget that 🤭
Like you I know the ansible playbook has its limits (for example one other thing I run into is that I want to run several instances of the same bridge to bridge eg. 2 whatsapp accounts!) but I do think docker is the way to go. I'm interested to hear how you're faring though as it's a long time ago since I tried that.
If you have your own domain name, you can get Let's Encrypt certificates for internal servers by using DNS challenges instead of HTTP challenges. I use subdomains like
whatever.int.example.comfor my internal systems.Of course, it's possible that the Ansible playbook doesn't support that...
Thanks for the note about Python and the Debian packages. That's a good point. I'll definitely use the Docker containers.