The Matrix protocol is full of concepts sometimes hard to grasp. In this post I’m going to try to cover how it’s used in the context of messaging, how close to e-mail it can feel, and how decentralisation is achieved in the open safely. For the sake of simplicity and ease of understanding I might lie to you sometimes: this post is aimed at non-experts. Instant messaging Matrix is a protocol to describe interactions between several entities.
I have a small droplet on Digital Ocean that acts as a reverse proxy to another larger machine. I’m using Wireguard between the two machines to create an encrypted channel and so I don’t have to mess with the network firewall. It also gives me a separate network interface that I can control with a firewall on the machine itself.
The host was an i3-4160 with 8GB of ram running Arch. It was hosting Synapse, among other things. I’ve recently upgraded to an i5-11400, but the i3 was working perfectly for Synapse.
I tried federating it a couple years ago, but I stopped since I wasn’t sure at the time if I wanted to keep that particular domain. And since I was only using it for the two of us, I didn’t bother setting up federation again. I imagine that it would put a larger load on the system depending on what rooms you join.
I have a small droplet on Digital Ocean that acts as a reverse proxy to another larger machine. I’m using Wireguard between the two machines to create an encrypted channel and so I don’t have to mess with the network firewall. It also gives me a separate network interface that I can control with a firewall on the machine itself.
The host was an i3-4160 with 8GB of ram running Arch. It was hosting Synapse, among other things. I’ve recently upgraded to an i5-11400, but the i3 was working perfectly for Synapse.
I tried federating it a couple years ago, but I stopped since I wasn’t sure at the time if I wanted to keep that particular domain. And since I was only using it for the two of us, I didn’t bother setting up federation again. I imagine that it would put a larger load on the system depending on what rooms you join.
I’m not familiar with Ansible, so I didn’t go with their recommendation to use that. Instead, I used the docker-compose.yml from their repository and modified it for my needs: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/contrib/docker/docker-compose.yml
Give it a shot though! Some people have said they’ve had trouble setting it up, but it’s been flawless for me.