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I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS - and You Should Too (joeyehand.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Blogger discovers this cool thing called "RSS".

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Matrix is probably the closest; it's federated, there are a dozen more-or-less actively developed clients, for just about every platform. You can self-host your own server. It has a lot of features.

It's not perfect; it has a lot of flaws, but there's slow progress. Things to be aware of:

Despite it being "open", there's really only one server that supports everything, and that's Synapse. It's where all of the new features are tested and land first. All other (half-dozen) servers lag Synapse. And - IMHO - Synapse is an awful piece of software. It's a giant mess of Python, and it lumbers along like a bloated, arthritic hippopotamus.
The way federation is done makes it very expensive to self-host. Everything's fine until one of your users joins - even briefly - a popular room, and suddenly your server's downloading 9GB of history and binary blobs. This can be managed, but you may as well quit your job and become a full-time admin, because
moderation tools suck. Aside from the most basic banning, all mod tools are external servers you have to set up and configure and run in parallel. And the most essential tool - mjolnir, a "this account is a troll spam bot, so ban it site-wide" is still very beta-ish and it's nearly impossible to get any help with setting up or using it.
It's really a rather heavy protocol. Lots of network traffic.
bridging is better in theory than practice. Most bridging requires you to run your own server, and few major hosts provide anything more than IRC bridging, and even then you can't actually bridge to most of the biggest IRC networks because it's blocked by the IRC providers, because Matrix bridges are a major source of spam grief for the IRC rooms. And setting up a bridge between a Matrix and an (e.g.) Discord room is a fairly significant PITA, requiring a Discord mod to perform several steps.
It does hand e2e encryption for DMs, but it's honestly pretty bad at it. It's a better Discord than a, say, Signal. Key management is a minor nightmare and it is both prone to breakage, and complex, with a lot of fairly obscure terminology needed to understand any but the most basic operations. Like, when it's working, it's fine, but as soon as anything goes wrong, you're in a world of pain. I came count the number of times I've lost entire chat histories with people.

And to throw up a challenge before anyone disagrees about that last point: try changing clients several times, across devices, and on the same client. Delete your client and reconnect (as if you lost your phone). See how long you can go before you hit a point where you can't get to your chat history.

It's a good alternative to Discord; it's categorically better than Discord. If you're not hosting the server, it's better than IRC; the user experience is simply undebatably better. It's a crappy IM platform. It needs far better mod tools, and some competitor to Synapse has to get out of Beta.

But if all you're looking for is an alternative to Discord and you ate fine with using a public service, it's a good choice.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Wow I had a whole message written to ask for information and here you lay it out so perfectly. Now I'm in paralysis mode though and can't decide if I want to self host..

If you have any tips, resources, or a simple breakdown of what I should focus on, I’d really appreciate it! Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

It really depends on your needs, like most things.

What are you trying to achieve? Just set up a place for folks to chat about a topic?

I'm inclined to suggest that if you're moving from Discord, then I suggest you pick a public server and create your room there. You already aren't self-hosting or getting bridging, so no loss. A public Mjolnir used to be on matrix.org but isn't anymore, so you have to be alert to spammers; if you have enough people you're willing to make mods, this is manageable. Matrix spammers tend to pop in, drop some fishing or advertisement; if you have someone watching 24/7 they can ban-and-remove the spam pretty quickly. Otherwise, you clean things up whenever you're in there; it's annoying, but not arduous. If you're a small room, you won't attract the spammers as much; if you're larger, I'd hope you have enough folks who can help mod.

I would not try to self-host out of the gate. If you do, start with a beefy server; you'll need a bunch of disk space - maybe not immediately, but as soon as one of your users joins a big room on a different server. I've only tried Synapse; you might try one of the other servers, but they'll all have the same disk space issue: it's a result is the design of the protocol.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks for the information. I just signed up using a public matrix but will look into bridge as well and possibly use Oracle free tier to set something up instead of on my homelab. Thanks again!!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago

Good luck!