That’s good news. Hopefully it will gain traction among individuals as well as a viable Discord alternative
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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I used to roll on the main matrix server, but I've been toying with the idea of rolling out a server for just myself here at home for a while now, since I can federate with other servers. Just disable making new accounts after I set up my own account and roll out.
I've been spending more time on my matrix server lately in preparation for abandoning discord.
I disabled federation because i currently run a server on a $4/month server but I'll whitelist other small servers to fed with. If your username is a reference to CBB and you wanna fed up let me know. I've already invited a lot of the freaks to my server.
I have good experience with matrix-synapse 😄 together with the bridges for proprietary services, your matrix client could be the ultimate chat app
And some even support sync of group chats through puppeting (may not be TOS compliant on some services)
When people say "servers" on Matrix, they mean like an "instance" of Lemmy, right? Not a "server," the way it's used in Discord. I'm rather new to this federation thing and I keep getting confused because some services use different terms (e.g. Peertube uses "platform," I think).
Yes, a matrix server is an "instance" of matrix on the larger federated service.
Discord calling their different channels "servers" was really unhelpful because they were never servers to begin with.
Thank you! Your username is hilarious, by the way.
Same :)
If you want to host your own matrix server, I can't recommend this project enough https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
Super easy to run and configure. And makes managing it a breeze
I have actually looked at this one before but the main reason I hadn't done it is no experience with Ansible. Would you say Ansible is easy enough to pick up just for rolling this out? I have a lot of networking experience, building docker compose files from scratch for projects, and am used to editing json and yml files. I have only set up a reverse proxy with caddy once and have never tried nginx although it seems more fully featured. Any thoughts would be appreciated. I also knoe of some good Ansible security hardening playbooks but once again just haven't used Ansible so never rolled them out
If you're more comfortable doing it another way, I totally understand preferring that route.
That said, the documentation on this project is really good. I didnt understand ansible before picking it up. At this point, I'm not at a level where I could write a playbook from scratch, but I can certainly read through it and understand what's going on and make changes to my config accordingly.
This playbook takes care of all the reverse proxies for you, so theres no need to do anything like that yourself.
If you have more questions, feel free to ask, and I'll try to answer them as best I can
I'd actually love a reason to try Ansible and get used to it. So if it's well documented, maybe a good starter project.
I don’t understand the matrix hype. It has never worked for me. Every server is just perma loading / syncing. It’s so slow.
Matrix sucks pretty bad at federation. But if you run a single closed server internally it works just fine.
Oh, is that why everyone hates matrix so much? I've been rocking it for years for me and my wife to communicate. It's been pretty solid. Calls/video calls are hit and miss, but the chat has been great. I've never federated it. Account creation is locked down, local auth, etc.
Matrix's encryption is perpetually broken. Every attempt to fix it still fails, sooner or later. Even on private instances.
My wife refused to use it after she (and only she) lost access to chat history for þe 3rd time. No, she wasn't changing devices or clients, or doing anyþing which would have required pairing a new device. Matrix's crypto has just been screwed up, forever.
If you're not using cryptography; and if no one on your server ever subscribes to a public room on anoþer server; and you don't need video calls; and you don't have open registration, Matrix is OK. It has nice features for public chat. Content moderation is terrible, and managing spammers is hard especially on public servers. Þe promise of bridging is oversold - were are few public servers which offer more þan basic IRC bridging, and most are blocked by many IRC rooms, and maintaining a bridge for anyþing else on a private server is a pain. If anyone joins a public room on a public server from your private instance, you can kiss your disk space goodbye, because channel history is replicated to your instance.
Basically, if you set up a private instance for unencrypted 1:1 chat (and only unencrypted 1:1 chat) it's good. But we're are hella easier ways to do þat and have privacy.
What’s wrong with your “th”?
They think it'll prevent or mess up ai scraping
To be fair, it is a thorny issue.
Oh, one of those jackasses.
I wouldn't go as far as jackass, but it is annoying to read lol
I would, and I did :-)
I like Matrix, but it definitely lacks refinement and isn't particularly user-friendly.
I think of it a bit as being the Linux of messaging platforms.
Edit: the vulnerabilities mentioned below were all implementation-dependent; the protocol appears to be fine.
~~I haven't been following Matrix development too closely, but last I heard, both the protocol and the reference implementation had serious flaws, including gaping security holes. As in, issues that couldn't be overcome without a clean-slate redesign. Did they somehow manage to salvage something useable?~~
Got any more info on what you heard? There were problems in their Olm library (certain vulnerabilities with encryption that could be exploited) and they encouraged projects (servers + clients) to switch to a more secure library. Anything else you are thinking of?
Okay, so on further research it looks like the vulnerabilities were all part of that library, and not inherent to the protocol itself.
Thank you for revisiting this. It's hard to stay up-to-date with all projects and I want to avoid anything with known glaring issues.
Do you have the issue trackers?
I wanted to like matrix.
They have been heading in government-corporate direction for a while now. Good for them, yet from a perspective of a small server hoster, everything is more complicated now for no good reason.
(Official ESS requires Kubernetes and a dozen subdomains, third-party auth service is required to even register a plain username+password account, calls are all over the place between Element, Element X and web client)