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!
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
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!
Sounds really interesting! Could you please indicate what are you selfhosting exactly in order to achieve this?
I’m running a mumble and a conduit server currently, and I’m not planning to ever touch shitcord again ^^
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.
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.
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.
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 run a single user matrix instance to join some chat rooms. Works great for me.
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.
Not sure if they do screen sharing but I’ve seen some buzz around ‘revolt’ recently which is self-hostable.
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.
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.
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.
Matrix has one caveat: it synchronizes every room (group chat) from another instance to your instance fully- which one user subscribed to on your instance. Because of this the instance-systems/servers are under heavy load for private userage (not controllable number of users and chats). Many governmental institutions (controllable number of users and chats) use though, because in case of “disasters/incidents” the data is not lost but saved all over all replicas.
Yeah, I’m hosting a Synapse instance; have been for a few years now. The biggest complication was the reverse proxy set-up, because I didn’t want matrix in my handle. 😁 But they’ve got great docs around that (and more) these days; and there’s a good community in the Synapse Admins room too.
