Since I recently set up a decently powerful homelab, with a bunch of services running on docker behind traefik, I thought it would have been cool to try out selfhosting a matrix homeserver for personal use (at the beginning it will be just me, potentially it will extend to some friends and/or a small organization of around 20 people working together). At first I was thinking about going with Dendrite, but then I’ve seen it still doesn’t support Threads, nor Matrix 1.5 API and that despite the announcement of a couple of months ago its repo hasn’t yet be moved to the new element-hq GitHub as it happened with Synapse. This made it seem kinda like a “2nd class citizen” compared to Synapse, and therefore made me think if the latter would have been a better option to selfhost. And then I bumped into Conduit.rs so now I have 3 option to be undecided about!
Therefore, here I am asking for your preferences and advices: which is your favourite one / which one would you recommend for my use-case?
+1 on the question. I’m also more for Dendrite since it solves the resource hogging of Synapse. For me the limiter is that the bridges are built for Synapse and will “likely” work on dendrite. If I didn’t have three small kids I’d be up for helping test but I don’t have that kind of time right now.
Unless a server/bridge implements the spec incorrectly, any bridge should work on any server, as they all talk using the appservice API.
That said, Synapse is the safe option, and for personal/family and friend use, the resource inefficiency is not that big a deal.
I’d love to move over as well, but for me the deal breaker is SSO. I want it to make my server (with various services) to have its own identity provider which controls access to the whole server
That seems cool! And it’s something possible only with synapse?
Yeah, right now it’s the only implementation that supports SSO, and no others look like they’ll be getting it soon either
Unfortunately, Synapse is still the most feature-complete matrix server.
For a small number of people, it is absolutely fine. I run it with five active users, each of which bridge to accounts on at least two other services and I personally bridge a couple discord servers in their entirety, even.
The matrix instance has never been a significant resource hog on my system, which also runs some game servers and often transcodes media.
If you do want to go with something more efficient, make sure you know in what way it is behind in feature-parity, and whether it’s a deal-breaker.
If not, running one of the newer servers is likely a better long-term solution (as long as you pick one that won’t eventually bite the dust in favor of yet another server project).
Thank you! If resource consumption is not a problem for small instances I’ll probably give Synapse a try, and keep watching Dendrite to eventually move to that when it will have all the features I like (mainly Matrix 1.5 to use it with Element Web and proper Threads support)
