Some years ago, I hosted my own matrix server for a few months. I’m an experienced self-hoster, but I remeber that Matrix was paticularly hard to host, requiring weird proxy rules, DNS adjustments, federation never worked reliably and push notifications never worked at all. I ditched the project soon because I also had no real use for it. However, I recently had some ideas where a Matrix server would be useful again. Has anyone attempted to install it recently and can tell me whether the situation has improved? Also, which server do you recommend? There still is synapse but I found it paticularly complicated to host. Dendrite is now archived and the current fork seems to be tuwunel which doesn’t seem to be under very active development.
If you want a conduwuit sucessor, I’d choose the continuwuity project over tuwunel. The legitimacy as the sucessor is mainly self-proclaimed, and continuwuity is a community effort. The entire thing is kind of a shitshow, though. If you want to do it like 99% of people, make friends with Synapse.
I think what you describe still holds true. You need a few correct DNS entries and an open port. Once you want VoIP, some more ports and a TURN server will be necessary. And that one took me some effort, but the server itself (including federation) was well within my comfort zone. And I run continuwuity these days because Synapse wastes way too much resources for what I do and their other efforts went nowhere. But I’m not sure about the future of those smaller Matrix server projects.
And if you don’t like Matrix or can’t get it to run, maybe try something like XMPP.
Why do you prefer continuwuity? Curious as I’m running tuwunel.
We’ve had the discussion a while back here in selfhosted. You can find it here: https://awful.systems/post/5029223
Main points: Continued drama around people, and tuwunel is tied to a single, (paid) developer and I figure once there’s anything wrong with that, tuwunel might die instantly. While continuwuity is a community effort and maybe that’s a bit more sustainable. Though I don’t own any crystal ball and I don’t know how things will turn out.