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Which Matrix server implemetation do I choose in 2024? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey, I'm fortunate enough to upgrade my home-server. I'd like to make some future-proof decisions. Which Matrix server do I choose? Dendrite? Conduit?

I like the candidate to be halfway well maintained, have active development during the next 4 years... Would be nice if it had a solid base and wouldn't hog that many resources. I'm okay if it still has some rough edges as long as they get ironed out in the near future.

It needs to provide service to me and a few friends and family. Audio calls would be nice and I definitely need it to connect to the Mautrix-WhatsApp/-Signal bridges.

Did I miss something? Is there another good server implemention apart from Synapse/Dendrite/Conduit?

Bonus questions:

Is Synapse the only server that can connect to SSO? Ideally I would like to maintain the user accounts via Authentik/LDAP/...whatever...
Is there a server that can handle multiple domains? Like an e-mail server that I can just tell "you handle mail for the following 5 domain names?"

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Synapse if you just want everything to work. Conduit (or its fork, conduwuit) if you're okay missing some features but want an efficient Matrix server.

Dendrite has lost development velocity and that's starting to become a problem. I wouldn't use it in a fresh install today.

I don't think SS0 is supported very well and I believe I've heard they're planning on changing how it works, but I don't remember the details. If you need SSO, you may need to stick with Synapse.

For your disk space issue, there are tools to compress room state and delete old media to keep disk space usage down.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

I installed Conduit a year or so ago for a small instance. Runs great and still active in development and updates. -- https://conduit.rs

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I did have a chat with one of the Element sales people a few months back and based on the conversation, it sounded that Dendrite is not anywhere on their roadmap to invest any resources.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Sad to hear, they have been announcing it for a while

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Synapse is the most feature-complete server, and still the one to receive spec compliance updates the fastest.

For a small number of users and bridges, it being written in python is not a concern performance-wise.

Not sure what you mean by multiple domains. The domain of the home server IS its identity, same goes for user addresses. You can't have multiple addresses all hooked up to one account on one instance. (At least not until account portability is a thing)

You could run multiple homeservers with different domains, tho. They'd essentially be separate instances, interoperable through federation same as everything else.

Synapse is what matrix.org currently runs, while Dendrite is what it will eventually use.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Thanks. Yeah I know most of the story/history of Matrix. I'm just now making the decisions for the years to come. And Dendrite has been the announced successor to Synapse for quite some time now... I'm not sure what to make of this. If it's going to happen soon, I'd like to switch now. And not move again and relocate my friends more times than necessary.

Judging by the graphs on my Netdata, Synapse plus the database are currently eating more resources than I'd like for just chat. Afaik the other projects were meant to address that. But I've never used anything else. And I've always refrained from joining large rooms because people told me that'd put considerable load on the server. If there's a better solution I'm open to try even if it's not the default choice... It just needs to work for my use-case. I don't necessarily need feature-completeness.

Yeah, with the multiple domains: I meant I have 1 VPS and like 3 domain names for different projects. I have a single email-server, one webserver and they just handle all three domains. Even Prosody (XMPP) has "VirtualHost" directives and I only need to run it once to provide service on all the different domains. With Matrix this doesn't seem to be the case... I'd need to launch 3 different instances of Synapse simultaneously on that one server and do some trickery with the reverse http proxy. That'd be more expensive and take more time and effort. I don't really care about how the identities are handled internally, I can provide them in a format that is supported. And the users are seperate anyways. It's just: I'd like to avoid running the same software three times in parallel.