It really depends on your needs, like most things.
What are you trying to achieve? Just set up a place for folks to chat about a topic?
I’m inclined to suggest that if you’re moving from Discord, then I suggest you pick a public server and create your room there. You already aren’t self-hosting or getting bridging, so no loss. A public Mjolnir used to be on matrix.org but isn’t anymore, so you have to be alert to spammers; if you have enough people you’re willing to make mods, this is manageable. Matrix spammers tend to pop in, drop some fishing or advertisement; if you have someone watching 24/7 they can ban-and-remove the spam pretty quickly. Otherwise, you clean things up whenever you’re in there; it’s annoying, but not arduous. If you’re a small room, you won’t attract the spammers as much; if you’re larger, I’d hope you have enough folks who can help mod.
I would not try to self-host out of the gate. If you do, start with a beefy server; you’ll need a bunch of disk space - maybe not immediately, but as soon as one of your users joins a big room on a different server. I’ve only tried Synapse; you might try one of the other servers, but they’ll all have the same disk space issue: it’s a result is the design of the protocol.
Thanks for the information. I just signed up using a public matrix but will look into bridge as well and possibly use Oracle free tier to set something up instead of on my homelab. Thanks again!!
It really depends on your needs, like most things.
What are you trying to achieve? Just set up a place for folks to chat about a topic?
I’m inclined to suggest that if you’re moving from Discord, then I suggest you pick a public server and create your room there. You already aren’t self-hosting or getting bridging, so no loss. A public Mjolnir used to be on matrix.org but isn’t anymore, so you have to be alert to spammers; if you have enough people you’re willing to make mods, this is manageable. Matrix spammers tend to pop in, drop some fishing or advertisement; if you have someone watching 24/7 they can ban-and-remove the spam pretty quickly. Otherwise, you clean things up whenever you’re in there; it’s annoying, but not arduous. If you’re a small room, you won’t attract the spammers as much; if you’re larger, I’d hope you have enough folks who can help mod.
I would not try to self-host out of the gate. If you do, start with a beefy server; you’ll need a bunch of disk space - maybe not immediately, but as soon as one of your users joins a big room on a different server. I’ve only tried Synapse; you might try one of the other servers, but they’ll all have the same disk space issue: it’s a result is the design of the protocol.
Thanks for the information. I just signed up using a public matrix but will look into bridge as well and possibly use Oracle free tier to set something up instead of on my homelab. Thanks again!!
Good luck!