Technology

If you set up your community on an existing server, like Matrix.org, it’ll be really easy. And it’s pretty easy to join as an end user.

But if you have your own domain, and you want to host your own Matrix server (mine is matrix.port87.help), be prepared to spend at least a day trying to get everything to work. There are six different services you need to run:

• synapse
• postgres
• element
• coturn
• jwt
• livekit

And there’s no guide for just setting up everything easily. You have to follow several different guides that sometimes have conflicting information. Not all the guides are exactly comprehensive, too, so be prepared to read a lot of documentation. You’ll also need to forward a bunch of ports, and then a port range (thousands of ports, for coturn).

It’s very easy to mess something up, and sometimes it’s very hard to tell. For example, I was running federation on 8448, like you’re supposed to, but my server was advertising that federation was on 443. This caused some rooms on other servers to be unjoinable. It gave me a cryptic error message about it, and I had to read through a few Stack Overflow posts and GitHub issues to finally figure it out.

Synapse will complain about Postgres’ collation and encoding, and that’s quite difficult to fix. You have to add some arguments to the startup command to force the right encoding.

Synapse will also log fucking everything, so make sure to set log level to “ERROR”.

None of this is meant to scare you away from running your own Matrix server. If you want help, I’d even be willing to zip up all my docker compose files and send them to you. This is more meant to indicate that the Matrix team should focus on making this process easier.