The Internet, and large groups of people in general, tend to have a remarkably short collective memory. Whether it’s the nature of algorithms or the people themselves to always be chasing the next novelty, maintaining long-term engagement for even relatively small changes can be challenging. Distractions abound, and motivation tends to fade over time. This past spring, Discord’s unpopular decision to force age verification resulted in a brief flash-in-the-pan of outrage that dissipated when they promised to delay its roll-out. Rather than backtrack on unpopular policies, they’ve been slowly boiling the frog with incremental changes towards this same goal in the meantime. One of the options to deal with this is to migrate over to something like a Matrix server, which has a number of benefits over Discord including being open-source and self-hostable.
Unlike Discord, a closed platform subject to the whims of a private company, Matrix is a communications protocol and open standard. Its major server and client implementations are open source, so anyone can build tools around it and integrate it with other systems that also use this protocol. This protocol-vs-platform comparison mirrors email, which is another protocol that isn’t locked down by any one company, and which can easily be used to send messages across various providers. The most commonly used server-side software for Matrix is called Synapse and the most prominent general-purpose clients are the various implementations of Element, and my exploration uses these defaults.
Analysis Paralysis
One of the problems with choosing a Discord replacement for one’s family, friends, or online gaming community is that there are a huge number of options. In much the same way Linux itself fails to make a dent in the desktop operating system market, open-source and community-driven projects are relatively easy to code and release but difficult to market and build up a sustainable userbase. So, while there are platforms like Stoat, XMPP, and others which provide self-hosted text and video communication, many of these services have a very small userbase or have some other shortcoming, and on some deeper level it can feel like flipping a coin to choose between any one of them and their myriad of forks.
For me personally, my choice of Matrix over any other option was partially driven by the fact that it seems to have an active and helpful userbase compared to others, it has it has strong end-to-end encryption support which is generally enabled by default (for private chats), and it’s possible to host on computers that I own. Another big reason I picked Matrix to experiment with is that self-hosting Matrix is optional. There is a large and active server called matrix.org that functions as a default server of sorts, which allows almost anyone to sign up and start chatting without having to install anything other than a Matrix client like Element. In this way, matrix.org feels a lot like IRC in its golden age because these large servers allow mostly anonymous Internet users to communicate about various topics in dedicated chatrooms without any great effort.
Federation Is Also Optional
Matrix is often loosely lumped in with other “federated” social media like Lemmy or Mastodon because, like these ActivityPub-based systems, there is no central server like Discord or Reddit and no overarching authority policing the entire network. So a Matrix server can federate with other Matrix servers, allowing users on the two servers to participate in the same rooms and exchange messages. If one server goes offline or decides to defederate for whatever reason, that doesn’t bring down the rest of the network, although users and rooms hosted exclusively on that server will of course be affected. Federation is also optional, and independent servers for one’s own family or friends that don’t federate with any other server is just as possible as a large server federating with all of the major servers like matrix.org. Compared to Discord, this decentralized structure makes it much more robust to a single entity’s whims.
Although a different protocol from ActivityPub which is used for other federated social media, Matrix also has a bridging network that allow it to communicate with other platforms, including IRC and Discord, as well as numerous other messaging services. So, in theory, setting up a Matrix server doesn’t preclude anyone’s friends on Discord from communicating with them, and might make it easier to migrate a friend group to the more open platform over a period of time, rather than expecting everyone to pick up and move all at once.
Starting The Virtual Machines
To that end, setting up a Matrix server does take a little more effort than creating a channel in Discord. I have a Proxmox server that makes setting up new servers relatively easy, but the server- and client-side software runs just fine on most Linux distributions without the help of virtualization. To start, I spun up an LXC container to run Synapse which is easy enough, but only includes text and photo chatrooms on its own. I was able to make this available on the wider Internet using a Cloudflare tunnel at first. With the Cloudflare URL, encryption keys, and the Element clients on various machines owned by my family and friends, everyone was easily able to get in to the chat rooms and communicate, with full end-to-end encryption and with messages stored on a machine I physically control. If you’re following along and want to stop here with just text-based chat, that’s certainly a viable and simpler option.
However, this does fall short of matching Discord’s quick voice and video calling, and this is where Matrix server administration can start to get a bit cumbersome. The short story here is that, at the time I set up my servers, there was a legacy calling mode alongside a newer one, so to support both there were two additional servers that needed to be set up. The legacy mode needs a TURN server, and the modern voice and video calling system supported by Element generally needs a LiveKit server. Since I set up my servers, though, this architecture has been simplified with TURN becoming less central to typical Matrix servers.
The next hurdle for me was getting around my Internet service provider’s network address translation (NAT). This is part of the reason I started using a Cloudflare tunnel in the first place, but the free tier is basically only an HTTP/WebSocket proxy which has no way to accept the UDP connectivity that TURN and LiveKit normally require for media. To solve that problem I turned to a small VPS that I rent which has a public-facing IP address. (I actually put an OpenOSCAR server on here first, back when this project got popular, to test out its capabilities and get it ready for my Matrix server.) The TURN server is lightweight enough to run on the VPS directly, but LiveKit is much more resource-intensive than I’m willing to pay for. This means LiveKit has to run on my server, so I set up a WireGuard connection from the VPS back to its container on the Proxmox machine.
Part of what makes this setup a little more difficult than average, besides the NAT-induced headaches, is that even once these packets get to my router, which is also hosted on my Proxmox machine, they go to a DMZ on a separate VLAN in my home network so that public-facing traffic can never get through to the rest of my LAN. But that DMZ includes a number of other public-facing services which are managed by an nginx server, adding yet another layer to this onion of a system. So between the support services for the Matrix server, the network layers, the off-site VPS, and the Matrix server itself, my setup involves six virtual machines, some interaction with Cloudflare, and one additional (albeit relatively inexpensive) paid service. This also doesn’t count the services I run on the Proxmox host and in other VMs to monitor web traffic and improve network security.
Even this setup, once I spent a considerable amount of time troubleshooting, has its downsides. For some reason which still eludes me, users on iPhones running the Element X client are randomly unable to send picture messages to chats. Occasionally a service on one of my many VMs will fail and need maintenance, and this seems to only happen when I’m not near my laptop. But perhaps most notably is that my Matrix server still doesn’t federate with any others. This isn’t really a problem as much as it was a conscious choice, though; it’s something that’s possible with a public endpont of some sort, so it’s my VPS makes this an option for me, but I haven’t attempted it yet. Mostly this is because the people on my Matrix server that actively use it are family members who don’t need or want that kind of exposure to the deep Internet, and my broader experience on matrix.org was often marred by things like crypto scams and generally desolate chatrooms.
All of This Has Happened Before, and All of This Will Happen Again
If you’re still with us after that extremely convoluted journey, it might seem like this is a lot to ask to replace a free service that’s been fairly instrumental in making it easy for gamers to interact with each other over the Internet and which has also revolutionized online chatrooms (for better or worse). But they have demonstrated time after time that they’re willing to slowly erode user trust, privacy, security, and experience in favor of shareholder value, and as they start rolling out “features” like age and identity verification they introduce more categories of sensitive information that are stored somewhere, and more potential points of failure. Given the long history of major companies failing to protect user data, it seems inevitable that someone will eventually make a mistake and expose information that users never expected or wanted Discord to collect in the first place. So for those who still have intact memories of Discord’s prior attempts to implement extremely unpopular policies, or even memories of other companies who have failed to protect sensitive user information in the past, a Matrix server might be worth the attempt.
You can’t convince a friend groups of non nerds to suddenly take an interest in migrating to the neckbeard land of Linux users with poor taste in good UI/UX, and expect them to also become infrastructure engineers to maintain their social lives. It’s just nigh impossible to budge a crowd of non technical people into doing anything. A lot of my old groups wouldn’t move off Telegram for Signal “because I can’t import my stickers/use my exiting packs” (this was before Signal had even added stickers mind you). People will not migrate until Open Source fixes the UI/UX problem that apps like Discord have annoyingly, solved through chucking money, Tencent, and Peter Tiel at the problem.
Keep in mind that in many countries simply having Signal installed on your phone can get you into serious trouble (prosecuted for being spy or anti-government). If you don’t want to end up in a cell with thief or narcoman just after you arrived better stick to standard apps.
btw. the so-called “burner phone” approach is a major red flag too and you might be arrested.
Signal was the example. Not saying it’s the right place to go; it sure isn’t. No Matrix, Stoat, or whatever hot new thing is going to replace Discord until people can figure out how to make federation seamless (or non existent), and build a UI and UX that won’t feel archaic. Federation also is kinda a pretty meh idea too. Take for example, a situation where two server admins argue and defederate – you suddenly lose contact with you friends on the other side. Looking at you, Mastodon & the fediverse. Generally if a social media platform loses your ability to be social, it has failed as a platform.
There are plenty of public matrix servers, so for most users they can just choose one, but people won’t of course. With the centralized servers, they have no choice, which is a better UX than having to select among many servers without any real knowledge about what to choose.
I doubt fixing a better UX than Discord would help. To me Element already gives a better UX, but it needs more/better features for people to become interested.
Which are these “many countries” in which you can get arrested for installing Signal?
how do they detect that my new phone is a burner phone?
I checked it a bit and appears that in those countries strong encryption is forbidden. And by strong encryption they mean also WhatsApp or Telegram. So which standard apps we are talking about?
Same thing with twitter and its alternatives. People wanted to leave, but found that the alternatives didn’t have the network effect as strongly, and if you slipped up and accidentally said you only supported the current deranged hysteria 105% instead of 115%, they would dox you and harass you and your extended family and pets IRL for three solid years.
So people went back and dealt with the “trolls” and “bots” (people they don’t agree with)
The only winning move is not to play. I know not everyone can be privileged to do that. If I had such a choice with Discord, I’d absolutely opt for it. But for social media.. Xitter, Bluesky, Instagram, TikTok and the likes.. yeah I don’t need them in my life and mental health has been better for it :)
This is very true. I no longer participate in social media. My life is better because of it. I do miss having events show up on my feed that I might like to go to, like art shows and stuff, but the rest just isn’t worth it. Meetup is better. Just don’t get to talking to people unless they’re standing in front of you.
This also describes what it’s like being a queer/trans/lgbtq+ person on the public internet pretty well. You don’t even need to be provocative; you just need to exist! ._.
That doesn’t seem to be true or at least no more true than for anyone else on these services.
On the other hand, there was very open and public discourse about doxxing and cancelling anyone who didn’t perfectly tow the line.
In my personal opinion, that makes it even MORE attractive to me. I remember the internet before it became a thing that non-tech types joined. It was glorious and a whole lot more fun. There were no commercial ads, just banners for other websites that were also free and fun. IRC was free in every sense of the word, and usenet was still full of interesting stuff.
Now everything is behind pay walls and if not, it’s like an adult daycare full of conspiracy theories and misinformation. I’m very close to gatekeeping, so I’ll stop here. I hate gatekeepers. I also hate what lowest common denominator has done to the net.
When there are no gatekeepers, you get exactly what the lowest common denominator has done to the net.
Gatekeeping has many good qualities.
Saying the UI/UX is somehow a fixed problem in closed source is bonkers. All these weird pictograms that don’t mean anything, these days quite possibly without functional hovertext labels etc etc, and usually heaps of features hidden away in nested menus its hard to find intentionally or simply behind the paywall of oh you need a premium+ subscription to do x…
All programs tend to suck till you learn how to use them enough, Discord included. Open source the UI does tend to be be that tiny tiny bit tricker to get started on the very most basic functions, as you might actually have to read a button label or the drop down menu to find the options you want rather than click the big shiny thing they assume is all you ever want.
But open source is also rather more logically laid out with all the options available and easy to find, so when something doesn’t work the way you want you can actually just find the settings/tools to fix it fairly quickly. Plus those tools will generally really exist in a useful fashion in FOSS… I gave up entirely on Discord long long ago despite it being almost immediately the only platform all my friends use as for some reason it was at least very very broken and the tools to ‘diagnose’ the issue just said ‘A-OK, nothing to see here’ despite the fact it completely failed to work properly at all. Where the open source program would at least have an easy to find ability to turn on a log you can read that will let you go ‘Oh its trying to… maybe I can fix at my end’.
Eh, your preferred UI/UX would probably be something that I would find to be in poor taste. That’s fine because taste is subjective, not universal. If you don’t believe me, try messing up your vision a bit (try tear gas for a temporary experiment, or a volatilized acid for a permanent choice) and see how fast your UI tastes change.
It’s an experiment that I would recommend to anyone responsible for designing a user interface that many people have to use.
But as for me and my house, we will remain with straight TTY interfaces. It’s less that they can be easily made to work over a shoelace and more that they can be arbitrarily consumed in a wide range of sensory modalities, including one suitable for vision defects, or even by non-meatbags. I don’t necessarily recommend that everyone try it as the flavor of the month, but it has been working well for me for a very long time, even in unforeseen disasters.
But each to their own taste (because taste is not something that can be prescribed).
Yes this – I was able to stand my ground with “Facebook never” but that’s about it. Discord, Telegram and WhatsApp unless I want to go into partial or full social isolation. Like, mention Matrix in a “non-hardline OSS” crowd enough times and you will not need to have all those apps you don’t like anymore as people will just find you so annoying they will stop talking to you. I tried – I was just smart enough to stop soon.
It’s not about infrastructure – I can run this no problem. It’s not even about UX – Discord with their (potential – didn’t happen to me yet) age verification and nags to pay for Nitro is not good UX at all. Whoever tried to set notifications on a larger Discord server knows there is a very thin border between “I am not notified about anything” and “I am completely flooded with things I don’t care about”.
The only problem those platforms solved is ease of getting in – people just don’t have problems with clicking “Accept” when the app tells them it will download their entire contact list and upload it to the operator’s server for them to do anything with it. They don’t care, it’s just a click. We will see how far this can go once Discord starts pushing age verification harder – if people will just accept that as the new reality or if there will be pushback (like real one, not just a loud minority on Reddit).
👏
Oh, it’s just some boring article about social media or messaging apps.
First glance at the picture and I thought it would be “If You Can’t Say Anything Nice 2: Electric Boogaloo”. So disappointed.
Discord is frequently use in hacker/maker communities. The article is highly relevant.
You’re probably too young to remember the tsunami of fecal matter that hit the comments section back then. Man, seeing that I was never happier to like and subscribe.
Which reminds me, had still on discord? If so, change of scenery planned already?
I am certainly old enough to remember the likes of WAP, Java applets, Microsoft’s version of Java applets (whatever the fsck they were even called), Flash, Silverlight, ICQ and Facebook being born, being the best thing since sliced bread, and dying before I needed to develop the slightest interest in either.
… what is this Discord thing this Matrix thing is supposed to replace?
xkcd://1782 all the way.
Yep, you won’t convince the whole 40,728 members of the Voron Design community to up and go that easily. They’re still trying to move off Reddit for serializations and have been for as long as I’ve been a participant – which is about 4.5 years.
For me, the point is never to get “a whole community” to move. It’s to find like-minded people who have something to teach you and to learn from you. Those people might already be in a community or three. And fortunately, association is a venn diagram, not a boolean. A significant number of those people are reachable via other means as well.
It’s not necessary that everyone choose the same communication solution, only that people who wish to communicate have an overlapping choice of solutions available to them.
A bigger community is not automatically better. In many cases, it actually degrades the signal-to-noise ratio, no matter what your personal definition of “signal” is. Of course, sitting back and watching the drama while eating sunflower seeds is also a perfectly respectable hobby, and many people find it interesting. There’s no such thing as “one size fits all” when it comes to hobbies or ways to fulfill them.
From what I’ve seen, most of the people who I would find enjoyable things to learn from share a similar attitude. I don’t really know if that’s common or rare, but I’ve never had problems finding opportunities to learn and socialize.
@Hackaday staff : this is the correct link to Synapse project (the link in the article point to a former repository which is now read-only) : https://github.com/element-hq/synapse
TY. Updated.
Been running a matrix server for our small hackerspace for about 5 years now using the MASH ansible notebook: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
I am not really familiar with docker so I have a dedicated (virtual) machine for the matrix server, and the ansible script manages everything.
It took an afternoon to get set up and about an hour of maintenance annually to pull the updates. I really couldn’t be happier.
But the most under appreciated part is how Matix supports ‘bridges’. The server is set up so that you can bridge to all of your non-federated chat (including Discord) into the matrix and not have to deal with all of the anti-patterns associated with those services. Just a single interface with all of your chats, like the lord intended.
I’ve wondered about this.
Could you have a Discord – > matrix bridge that relays chat back and forth, make it some sort of admin that is the only one allowed to that.
It means users could move over slowly and no one misses anything.
That is the main use case for Matrix-compatible applications: bridging to everything.
https://matrixdocs.github.io/docs/bridges/discord
I am building this. I make professional software, love linux and open source, and also good at ui ux. I build and give coding tools to my co workers all under gplv2 like the good ol days. If I really like love something I built i give it away, I am making a new social chat app, I call it…Chat…because im tired of silly names lol. ive also built automated call centers so that is being used instead of voice mail so you can have a conversationwith your agent. Built on top of a distributed fs I also built called collectivefs which is a distributed fs giving centralized control with untrusted peers. Check it out on github, I give it in interviews to new engineers as a torture test since i know they have trained on it and mixes encryption encoding and distributed systems.
The message could not be decoded.
Matrix E2EE really sucks. I don’t understand the need to force everything to this BYOK strategy. Use it only if you think that https isn’t enough to protect from your goverment.
And lets face it; Matrix is just a bridge central server – allowing WhatsApp/Telegram to continue as normal. It might even make everything worse as there is no real push for anyone leaving users closed corporate platforms.
Tailscale could have helped as well.
I do actually use Tailscale for some things, but one of my goals was to make it as easy as possible for new users to join my Matrix server. Saying “hey, you need to install Element, here are your keys, and also now install this OTHER thing, and make sure it’s running when you want to chat” kind of makes most peoples’ eyes glaze over.
Actually, that would make me tell the friend with the Matrix server to talk to me through e-mail instead. If he cannot produce a configuration where I simply install a client and access the server through it, well, said software won´t receive much attention
Doesn’t Tailscale offer tunnels like Cloudflare does? Or are they similarly limited in what they will forward?
Or just use openvpn and your domain. So funny seeing tailscale blow up like we havent have vpn for decades. Now you can just ask you agent to set it up if you dont want to learn.
I’ve been on the lookout for a Discord alternative for years, and Matrix really isn’t good enough to carry the torch. It has so many bugs and deal-breaking issues that it straight up makes me mad every time I use it. For an (open-source!) alternative that competently copies Discord, Fluxer is worth taking a look instead. Chances are, Fluxer is what most people looking to get off Discord want, where if they care more about things like e2e encryption, Signal and co. remain viable choices. I use both.
dont need to exodus something i never really used.
Discord is for ADHD people.
It’s an information sinkhole, with low SNR, and hardly searchable.
Bring back the forums!
Is it really one or the other? I think of Matrix as being a place for realtime chat and forums as being longer term Q&A. Apples and oranges.
While true, there have been a number of forms that have migrated to discord instead. (Looking at you Ardupilot)
It is objectively inferior, and certainly an “information sinkhole”.
Lots of people only have enough time to bother doing one. if that “one” is discord, the info remains entirely undiscoverable by anyone not using discord. It’s not an inherent limitation, just a practical one.
Using Discord as a forum replacement sucks, 100%. It’s unsuitable for that by design. If that’s all you use discord for then yes, rather obviously you’d rather use a traditional forum and you’ll probably find yourself constantly wishing that people didn’t try and shoehorn that use case into it (I know I do).
OTOH though, that’s not the only use case for discord and if you participate in the other more ephemeral uses for discord and you see what’s been happening in regards to the general enshittification that’s been going on with discord for the past while, you probably are looking for an alternative for those use cases that a plain old forum doesn’t serve well. That’s where things like Matrix become relevant.
I recently set up a Matrix server. I wasn’t using Discord so not because of that. There were some projects I wanted to get involved with that use it for their communication. I guess I could have just used a client and registered at matrix.org or whatever it is but.. I thought if I was going to try to swim I might as well go straight to the deep end.
So far I like it. The move from IRC to closed systems by so many open source teams and hackerspaces bothered me so I am very glad to discover Matrix and see that others are too.
matrix is ugly, lost setup, is big. No matrix is not good options. tox is better but have worst clients.
god is xmmp jabber
I hosted a Matrix server using Synapse for several years, with a handful of people and a bridge. It worked, but is a real PITA in some aspects:
– database gets huge very fast (due to a specific write-only table)
– there is no automated cleanup (your server keeps all rooms that any user joined, even if that user left the room later)
– users cannot be fully deleted (how is this GDPR-compliant is a mystery)
– onboarding is just terrible (mobile app cannot use registration tokens, so you need to either make accounts for people, or allow open registration – yikes)
– no official admin panel (I wrote my own)
The new Element 2.0 and Element Server Suite does not make anything better. The server now requires Kubernetes to run (and about half a dozen services, all defacto required), and ElementX (the new app) has no feature parity with the old one.
Although, I have heard good things about Continuwuity server.
Also, Matrix is a big spot to end up stumbling upon CSM.
So, I recommend being really careful.
Thanks for deleting my comments! I’ll stop reading and recommending Hackaday. Site has no tooth.
And nothing of value was lost.
They delete everyone’s comments sometimes. Welcome to the club of 1984.
I don’t think it’s them doing blanket deletion which come back. Mods can just lock it if things get out of hand.
i think people are gaming the report mechanism to get stuff taken down or silence people they dont like. all you really need is a tor browser or vpn, report and change credentials, repeat ad nauseam. which is a really fascist thing to do by the way. its disturbing when it comes from people who are supposed to be against that sort of nonsense (sort of outs em as commies doesn’t it?).
Communist, Fascist. Doing the same thing for the opposite reasons and insisting theirs smells better since (at least) Roman times.
It’s where the boot is, not why it’s there that matters to me.
Pretty dumb thing to say, black and white thinking that reduces historical movements to slogans is very nerd-brained behaviour. Admitting of zero nuance is what generates the cycles of revenge/ressentiment that sets the stage for fascism imo. Along with market economies in crisis. These are objectively different conditions than those which have given rise to communism, even if you put both in a box labelled ‘bad’ it makes no sense to align two very different things. Hitler’s anti-Marxism rallies come to mind, or that one poem about Them coming for the communists…
In any case I doubt anyone on Hackaday cares about your comments enough to go to the trouble, the things you are saying are pretty much dime-a-dozen :)
When I self hosted Matrix I ran into a federation problem. For whatever reason, my setup didn’t get recognized by Element on Web or mobile, I had to use FluffyChat instead.
Everyone who wants to switch to Matrix doesn’t address the voice/video streaming. Easy video streaming is half of the reason people use Discord.
Matrix originally solved this with Jitsi, a third-party application that was never integrated into the protocol or platform. It was a embedded widget, and it sure as hell felt like one. You had to log in to Jitsi and embed a second full single-page app to use it. Jitsi wasn’t supported across most Matrix clients, why even use it? It made more sense to ask my friends to use Jitsi, but their UI and software stack was so embarrassingly retro, I would never.
Matrix tried to do a few RFC’s (which they call MSC’s for no reason) to do video calls. The first was merely 2-party, which really defeats the purpose of voice calling. Screen sharing is a huge pain and the UI has no improvements in most clients.
Element hijacked the protocol and had to write their own MSC’s, embedded their protocol deeply with LiveKit as the SFU. The only way to do multi-participant video calls is SFU, Selective Forwarding Unit. LiveKit wholly depends on the
/.well-known/URL patterns, there is no way around it, so you need a managed HTTP proxy-forwarder to set it up.To run a Matrix server your friends will actually use, you need more than a Raspberry Pi. You need something that can handle SFU, you need at least 5 separate services running, you need to manage a whole orchestration of a server.
It’s way more than “set up Synapse”.
And once you finally have it all set up, the network is dead.
The majority of Matrix is IRC and Discord bridges.
Nobody likes bridges.
Jitsi used to have very high server requirements as it was running transcoding on the server. Most hardware we had couldn’t keep up with 20+ people connected. Also the first user had admin rights. Did your connection drop and you reconnected? Bingo, now you are not administrator of this instance!
Also, it tended to be so unstable we still use Zoom…
I’m just getting started with Matrix so I have a question. Why does no one like bridges?
I was there for the old Instant Messenger days. Some friends had Aim, some had ICQ, a few oddballs had MSN or Yahoo. Gaim was amazing when it received multi protocol support. Or did Pidgin come first? I don’t remember. Anyway, it was not exactly a bridge but it served the same purpose to me. Suddenly I could talk to them all with just one application running. I could even pull friends from across platforms into a chat and be the bridge between them.
As for video chat… So? I’m not a gamer and so far I have only ran into Matrix where IRC formerly was used. I can’t imagine WANTING video or voice chat. But I do like options even if I don’t expect to use them much. So I installed Livekit. I was just following AI instructions. And it wasn’t hard at all. If I ever did want to try to get my friends on Matrix with me I would just offer them logins on my own server. I wouldn’t expect them to have to install all that. Unless Matrix.org includes Livekit…. I haven’t checked.
On a side note frogs are amphibians, need to regulate temperature externally, and don’t like to get too hot. Unlike us humans.
I always wondered if hot tubs would be treated with more respect if that expression were more appropriate.
I miss ICQ.
I vibe coded my own Discord replacement, no need for Matrix. It has apps for every platform and web browser, 60fps 4K desktop streaming with multiple people without subscription, and watch party feature for media server and youtube. It completely replaced my Plex setup for music too. All my friends hopped on it. If people actually knew how to utilize Claude no one would be paying for Nitro. F these services and subcriptions.
Yup did the same use it for my family because I am uncomfortable with having my kids use Google chat. The key to expand to the world is my other project called collectivefs. That will solve the problems mentioned here with all the centralized and federated servers.
Any plans for a Hackaday server or room on Matrix? (instead of, or bridged with, the existing Discord)?