I am about to embark on my 8th attempt to install matrix / synapse / element in a fresh debian box.
I have succeeded 3 times to varying degrees (never got the extra things added like better moderation or custom stickers I think it was) -
I just did a quick ddg search to see if there are current docs on doing this setup.
Last time I remember running into docs that said these are old docs being archived, but no new docs available.
I spent a number of days in the chat trying to hone in on the small errors in homeserver yaml and going back and forth trying to get nginx or caddy to do that basic things it needs to.
I'm sure there were other weird things.
My quick scans of the search results and stuff on element saying its old, use pro element (with no links to pro element, which I finally found, - now has me out trying to learn how to use Kubernates or whatever - so another detour to other places to learn things before getting to 'is it possible to install this thing on current debian today'.
before I can even get to seeing if the install info is updated or complete these days.
I'd love it if someone that writes docs there could watch somebody try to install this thing, and all the going back and forth and searches and 20 different websites and tutorials from so many different places to do things to make it work.
It's worth it, but it's a lot of moving parts to get started,
and the moderation - that was 10 times easier with RealChat system Eugene released to the world 22 years ago.
Still there's nothing better self hosted that I have found.
I admire your perseverance, I gave up on Matrix personally. When was the last time you had a shot at XMPP? Have you tried ejabberd? That's probably one of the most "fire and forget" services I sysadmin, and it does everything out of the box as a single server (STUN/TURN, audio/video calls, …). That's refreshing.
Thanks for the suggestion, I am looking at it now - for some reason my first scan of the first page about it found on DDG I was convinced it was a non-self-hosted 'service' only.
Then a downloads page (which I clicked to wonder if it was 'you need a client to interact with our cloud service' kind of page.. seems to point to self hosting as an option - so I will give this a go.
I recently gave a presentation for another biz about chat community options. During the research I stumbled upon rocket chat with a totally grown up look and feel quite shockingly, and found trillian.im as possible self host contenders.
There were a couple others but some things in my features matrix made them less likely as a replacement for matrix as an option for those needs.
I'm still hopeful for matrix to become easier to deploy and easier to use, as it has real potential.
One reason wordpress got so popular is it's famous 5 minute install; and that was doing it manually.
Any noob can rent a $10 shared host, login to cpanel (or other panel these days) and click a button that installs wordpress, it's needed DB, creates the admin and emails you the details. Up an running in seconds.
somebody get matrix to run via one click with softalicious / fantistico like abilities please!
Of course wordpress benefits from lots of paid addons (for hundreds of developers not just wp/automattic) and a healthy 'pay for development ecosystem' - but most of that grew from the ease of install (and at the time lots of fancy free themes that were subsidized from many groups with different reasons).
With matrix I wish there was a chart of wanted features / fixes and people could escrow vote with dollars for things and they get released to everyone.
I think I group funded a feature for rocket chat years ago with options via bug county source? Something like that.
I also think Matrix would be better as a no federated self hosted install and connect some sort of bridge on a different server if someone wants to connect the federated stuff - less complaints and support issues with being bogged down.
The agony of trying to install has made me find other things to do so I can avoid having to do it this weekend, and I should of redone it last weekend. sigh.
> I'm still hopeful for matrix to become easier to deploy and easier to use, as it has real potential.
I mean, I'm admittedly biased here, but the "easy to deploy, $10 shared host IM" already exists and is XMPP. Matrix is doomed to be inefficient, and that's baked at the protocol level. It won't ever get easy and cheap to deploy and run, judging from the recent year's trajectory, with more and more components being added to the mix.
> somebody get matrix to run via one click with softalicious / fantistico like abilities please!
> I also think Matrix would be better as a no federated self hosted install and connect some sort of bridge on a different server if someone wants to connect the federated stuff
Another software delivering a slack-lite experience geared towards corporations is prose: https://prose.org/ it's also XMPP, their client can be used with ejabberd but they have an easy-deployment bundle that ships Prosody instead (yeah, unlike the Matrix ecosystem, XMPP has multiple completely viable and compatible implementations, ejabberd and prosody being only the two most popular).
I have succeeded 3 times to varying degrees (never got the extra things added like better moderation or custom stickers I think it was) -
I just did a quick ddg search to see if there are current docs on doing this setup.
Last time I remember running into docs that said these are old docs being archived, but no new docs available.
I spent a number of days in the chat trying to hone in on the small errors in homeserver yaml and going back and forth trying to get nginx or caddy to do that basic things it needs to.
I'm sure there were other weird things.
My quick scans of the search results and stuff on element saying its old, use pro element (with no links to pro element, which I finally found, - now has me out trying to learn how to use Kubernates or whatever - so another detour to other places to learn things before getting to 'is it possible to install this thing on current debian today'.
before I can even get to seeing if the install info is updated or complete these days.
I'd love it if someone that writes docs there could watch somebody try to install this thing, and all the going back and forth and searches and 20 different websites and tutorials from so many different places to do things to make it work.
It's worth it, but it's a lot of moving parts to get started,
and the moderation - that was 10 times easier with RealChat system Eugene released to the world 22 years ago.
Still there's nothing better self hosted that I have found.