So I recently wanted to set up a private chat service, mainly because I wanted a place to get notifications from things like alertmanager, homeassistant, et al. And at first I was looking at Zulip, which looked great, but then I realised that many communities I'm part of use matrix, and so now I have my own matrix server.
Some observations:
- Setting up synapse was easier than I expected.
- The initial client UX, especially when it comes to encryption keys is painful at first, this is something I doubt normal users will ever tolerate.
- Joining channels on other servers can be insanely slow when you haven't joined anything on that server before.
- Once it works, it's a cool and ambitious way of chatting, maybe overambitious.
- The extensibility is pretty cool, reminds me of things like bitlbee.
- It's nice to be able to join community channels of Fedora and c-base without having to have an account on their servers.
All in all, now that the initial pain is over, I enjoy it, but I never see it going mainstream with the current UX. If you want to chat, hit me up, I'm @ainmosni:ainmosni.eu
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