this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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My community just setup a Matrix instance and we're migrating everyone over. Several already cancelled their subscription.
I actually ran into a colleague in a random room, who is also leaving Discord.
It's pretty nuts, there's a big exodus going on.
Any guides? Been looking at Element but that set up is intimidating.
Are you self hosting? I just set up an instance today and it was extremely easy following the instructions for the ESS Community edition on github.
I was going to run it on an old gaming PC i been using for piHole. I was thinking a VM as I couldn't find a premade container and don't want public stuff running on the machine directly. I was still trying to work my way though reading the docs but got hung up on understanding Kubernetes before starting the setup. I also got sick of fighting Virtual Machine Manager pool location permissions last night.
If you plan on federating, it can end up being pretty resource heavy, so consider either not federating or planning ahead.
What's the federation like? Haven't decided on it yet. Realistically I may convince 10ish people to join so I'm not sure it be worth the hassle.
I'm not trying to say that you can't/shouldn't federate with others. You don't need to federate everything, all channels, etc, nor should you IMO. I found out really quickly that the small server I had set aside for it was not up to the task when I decided to sync up the matrix.org main channels. You need lots of ram, FAST storage, and a good internet connection at bare minimum.
Oh man, I think I just need Synapse and not the full ESS suite. May have been making this harder than I needed.
If you just need a chat server for your and some friends and family, that is almost certainly will work for you.
Nice. I was feeling way over my head with ESS. Thanks!
Sure, no problem. I'm sure you'll get a basic server up and running, it isn't too bad.