Comment by Barathkanna

Comment by Barathkanna 2 days ago

TLDR Self-hosting isn’t dying because people stopped caring. It’s dying because the complexity has gotten out of hand.

This post highlights how something that used to be a fun, lightweight hobby has turned into a full-time maintenance burden. Systems like Matrix are powerful, but they’ve become so intricate that even skilled engineers struggle to run them reliably. The result is a slow drift back toward centralized platforms, not out of preference, but because convenience keeps winning over autonomy. It’s a reminder of the growing gap between the ideal of a user-owned internet and the realities of modern software.

omnimus 2 days ago

I would say it became much easier in recent years. docker-compose became defacto server "app install", any linux supports it. That includes GUI options like Truenas/Unraid and very nice admins like Dockge exist.

The company behind matrix is aiming at huge scale servers but if you care about unfederated private instances you will find there are few much simpler "one binary" projects that can even use file based sqlite/rocksdb. Hosting those couldn't be simpler. You actually don't even need docker just systemd service and switch binary when updating.

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Arathorn 2 days ago

If you want a simple docker-compose for Matrix, you can always use https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo.
The reason Element ships ESS Community as kubernetes helm charts is simply so that the officially supported distro is as close as possible to the thing we have to support for the big govtech customers, where docker compose simply isn't going to cut it. Perversely, that means that ESS Community is pretty bulletproof (even if the scaling stuff is missing), but comes at the expense of having to run k8s.

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BrenBarn a day ago

Yeah, I think this is true and it's unfortunate. I think it's one of the areas where what seemed like the plan for Matrix hasn't totally worked out in practice. And it's even just the intricacy of managing it; some of the problems are deeper in the design. When I started using it several years ago, it seemed their vision was a lot of people running a lot of small servers. But the full-replication nature of the protocol, plus the resource demands of the server software, make that kind of impractical. Even tech-oriented people may shy away if they find out the database could grow to tens of gigabytes, and Synapse is not exactly light on RAM or CPU either.

Perhaps in the future if implementations improve some of this may get better, and it will become more feasible for small operators to run their own servers. But by that time it will be harder to build trust because too many people will have written it off as bloated or unstable. I think it would have been better to start lean and keep the system in more of a nerd niche until that process of evolution reached a later stage.

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catelm a day ago

NixOS makes this rather easy too. There exist modules for synapse, livekit, etc (MAS module is still a Pull Request, though) and the setup is quite doable: https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Matrix

However, you still need to know what you are doing (the manual helps) and connect the pieces (in theory there could be a nixpkgs module that does this for you but apparently nobody did bother). Once its done you can lean back.

I've been running my homeserver happily for > 5 years and it was fairly straightforward.

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oblio a day ago

Yeah, but then you have to run NixOS, which besides the sheer difficulty of being Linux, for the average user, stacks Nix on top, which comes with its own learning curve.
Also, based on your description, you're a techie. I highly doubt the average city hall clerk will set up their on Matrix server.

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