Hey guys!
A year or so ago I tried hosting a federated matrix and synapse server. While at the beginning it seemed nice, the moment I tried to join a large room it died completely for 10-20 minutes while blasting my DNS server with 10K+ requests. Sometimes at the end it wouldn’t join, while filling the logs with errors. It really didn’t seem like a good user-experience. Ironically, one of the groups I tried to join was the support group, but I failed, because it was too big.
I am wondering if it has improved since, or it’s pretty much the same.
At the same time, I’m also wondering if there’s a good, fast self-hosted alternative, that kinda just works.
Not waiting 20 minutes in 2023 for a messaging platform to sync if I join a single group with default settings.
You do understand that running a federated server means that you are taking over hosting duties for that chat protocol, right? I wonder, why do you want to run a federation outpost if the requirements to do that seem annoying to you? Just join the group via matrix.org’s own server and you are settled, they have the knowledge and the resources to run a proper matrix server.
Edit “a single group” with maybe hundred thousands of cat gifs takes a while to sync unless you instruct your server to omit the backlog.
Sorry - so the default, recommended settings try to cache absolutely everything from a single group, including cat gifs posted 5 years ago? I’m sorry, but I expected the default settings more… sane?
Well, I wanted to try hosting myself, since I love self hosting things and people keep repeating how amazing Matrix is - my experience (waiting 20 minutes to join a single group, or it simply failing) didn’t convince me. It’s possible that I’m the wrong here, in that case I’m happy to hear solutions.
I have no idea, I have zero desire to host a matrix server. But I wanted to have one, I would make sure to check what the actual requirements in terms of bandwidth and storage are and what will happen if I fire up the server.
It’s like hosting a TOR exit node and then complaining about all the data going over my network.