I want to setup a matrix instance to help increase friends and family’s privacy. Is there much value in creating my own instance?
I’m a beginner to linux and coding, but am good at following the steps on a video tutorial.
Alternatively i could get everyone to sign up on a preexisting instance + download the element app.
Thanks for sharing your opinions !
I would recommend you rather look at Snikket, which is a really easy to setup and use XMPP server with nice mobile clients. Perfect for a small family server and very easy to setup.
A Matrix home-server is not too difficult to setup either (conduit.rs is easiest IMHO), but in the medium term it is quite server resource intensive to run as it needs a relatively fast server and has an ever increasing database that can easily surpass the SSD storage available on cheaper VPS.
Appreciate your alternative here.
Why is Matrix so resource intensive compared to XMPP ?
Matrix is basically over-engineered for a chat protocol. It uses a very complex git like distributed database with high CPU and RAM demanding merging operation to ensure a consistent state between the participant servers. In addition this data-structure means that a lot of the meta-data (room-state) can never be erased and gets replicated on every server connecting.
XMPP on the other hand is specifically optimized to be highly scalable (proven to work with billions of users) and tries to minimizes the metadata data-sharing between servers (although that could still be improved).
I tried snikket but couldn’t get video calls to work unfortunately… Do you know of a good guide that explains how to do set up video calls?
It should work out of the box, but video calls are especially difficult to establish on some mobile phone networks using CG-NAT. Make sure you have the right ports open for STUN/TURN on your server, otherwise maybe ask on the Snikket support chat room?
Thanks. Do you know how to test if a phone network uses CG-NAT?
Basically all do, but some are worse then others. Check if it works when using the same wi-fi connection first.
Thank you. I ended up doing this.
However snikket has some shady funding.
I went for prosody server and set my family up on conversations, blabber, and chatsecure clients. Works great for sending text, pics, videos, voice clips. All e2e encrypted !
As a linux beginner, it was prety easy to setup (provided you have the time). Only issue is with voice/video calls. They use p2p instead of going thru sever, so can’t connect well especially on mobile networks behind NAT. Apparently I need to setup up a stun & turn sever.