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Other Fediverse projects
(en.wikipedia.org)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I personally really enjoy Matrix but it’s not really a “fediverse” thing but it is a federated end to end encrypted messaging platform
I personally set it up to use as a messaging aggregator. The ability to scroll past Whatsapp, Telegram, and Discord chats in the same app is hilariously cursed. There are bridges for basically everything. Though some are more complete than others.
Bridging ha also been very effective for showing people the merits of matrix. Opening schildi and scrolling for a bit has made people go "GIVE ME THAT". Everyone is tired of having half a dozen chat apps just be able to talk to everyone they know.
I've been seeing things about matrix more and more and it's seeming like something interesting. I checked out their website and, like a lot of this stuff, it's a bit unclear for me.
So you do as you do here and set up an account on an instance and then port everything through it? Does smashing all the different chats into one list have a way to differentiate them from one another? I'm just looking for more about it to help me understand it.
I run a private personal instance. It is federated, meaning I can message anyone else on any other federated matrix node, and they can message me. But no-one can make an account on my instance without a single-use token from me, which I create using admin privileges.
The bridging is done using extensions to the matrix server, in the form of bridge bots. They will create puppet accounts for each bridged user, which they will then puppet to mirror that user for you. You also give this bot access to your external account, allowing them to "puppet" your account to the users you're talking to, on their respective platform. I run these on my own hardware, same as the actual matrix server, which they talk to.
You can set it up in a variety of ways, but in my case, I made it so that bridged users have their platform appended to their display names. A user from discord appears to me as "Username (Discord)". That way, even if I have the same person on both Discord and Telegram, I can find and differentiate them in matrix.
If you want matrix for bridging, your own instance is likely the best bet. If for example, you create a user on matrix.org, I have no idea how I'd go about actually bridging any other accounts to that user, as I would not have access to managing the extensions available on the matrix.org instance.
As far as I know, matrix.org and most other instances only concern themselves with communicating between matrix users. The only matrix anything that advertises bridging, is beeper.com, which is currently invite-only. It's matrix in the backend, I think, and seems to intend to be a paid service for having all your chats in one place.
It's possible to use the extensions of another matrix server, from another server, but this is not ideal (it comes with some access permission limitations). And finding a server with these extensions set up, and with an admin willing to let you access them, can be tricky.
That said, setting up your own matrix instance is not as complex as setting one up for the fediverse (ActivityPub). If you don't care about federating, it's even easier, and you can always enable federation later. You do need a domain, a permanent one. There is no way migrate the domain to another, once a matrix server is set up, at this time. The only way to do that is to literally delete everything and start over. A lesson I learned the hard way...
Feel free to dm me if you wanna know more :D