- pelzatessaI like matrix, but I'm glad they decided to go with SimpleX as an alternative instead of slack, discord etc. XMPP would be fine too i guess, but I think that projects like SimpleX and Matrix need more people to mature, while XMPP seems to have a lot of users but no ability to grow anymore. I also had to choose between simplex and matrix for my personal communications foundation, and I chose matrix as I gambled on its longer existence as indicator for maturity and therefore adaptability for my non-tech friends, time will tell if the bet was right.
- Been selfhosting synapse for about 1.5 years in a docker compose setup using bunkerweb (formerly "bunkerized nginx", which better explains it premise) reverse proxy, eturnal for TURN and postgres, also recently added livekit and MAS for element call and element X compatibility. All that runs on a small 2vcore/4gb VPS, and it runs pretty good, I experience a server crash every half a month, but that may be caused by the fact that bunkerweb isn't the most lightweight solution (they actually require 8GB RAM minimum, so I'm already beneath the limit), and also because I run some other software (mailserver, ebook server, plex, etc..).
My experience as a administrator has been pretty good, perhaps it's because from the beginning I was optimistic, it suited my needs as I wanted a selfhosted, modern and fairly convenient communication platform. From what I recall, most problems during configuration were caused mostly by bunkerweb (or rather my inability to correctly set it up to proxy requests correctly and not hijack the 4xx and 5xx HTTP codes). Synapse itself has been a pleasure to maintain, but also bear in mind that I did not tinker with with it, I basically set it up and let it run for about a year and then added MAS and livekit.
Yeah, disk usage sucks, for about 5-10 active users and 1.5 year usage my postgres "schemas" folder clocks at 10Gibs. It doesn't include the media_store catalog where synapse keeps media (images, videos). The homeserver is federated and I joined a couple of big rooms in the past. Mechanics mentioned in the links below do help though:
https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/v1.40/admin_api/purge_h...
https://github.com/matrix-org/rust-synapse-compress-state
Clientwise also sucks, but I think enough has already been said on this matter. But it's good enough to keep my nontechnical friends using it. They do hate it, but not enough to kick me in the arse. Would love to say that this proves that element clientside is usable, but I also have to admit that my friends are just hella good guys who would even write pigeon mail to me if I stopped using anything else for communication :) for me as a techie, element is obviously alright. Clunky, but works. I think clients simply need more time.
What irritates me is the Matrix authentication service (MAS), it's kind of a separate service for matrix homeservers that handles logins specifficaly. You can't use element X without it. However when it's enabled, you cannot log in from your client, instead a web browser opens and shows the login panel where you have to authorize, and then it should return to the client. Except in my case it simply doesn't :( I observed that for some reason chromium based browsers won't redirect back to the element app, and it doesn't know that the authorization has been granted. I managed to bypass it by copying the URL and opening it on firefox, but in one instance even that didn't work.
But other than that MAS problems everything has been fine from administration standpoint. I think it simply needs more time, as it already has traction, I see that a lot of new projects seem to include a matrix room in their social/communication channels, frequently it's the only option besides the bugtracker. And I'm willing to wait patiently :)
edit: added links for people who also struggle with disk space usage
- Most interesting, will bear that in mind. To this date I haven't encountered any "drastically wrong" symptoms with my d3 usage and frankly haven't heard that much about any adverse events linked to vitamin d3. If you feel comfortable with that then you could disclose what exactly is that adverse effect you've been experiencing, but I see that you try to avoid this topic so no pressure :)
- I take 8000 D3 (+200ug K2 MK7) daily and I'm fine. since covid I go like this for entirety of winter and then back down when summer comes. Perhaps you live in a climate where you get a lot of sun exposure and somehow overdosed on that. A guy from vitadmindwiki.com even says that you'd have to take 14000IU daily for a year until reaching toxicity limit (although this guy tends to sometimes say different things on the same topic, so I'd be cautious on whether this is the exact amount) https://vitamindwiki.com/Overview+Toxicity+of+vitamin+D
Although it'd be great if you explained what exactly happened, perhaps it wasn't a result of taking vitamin D itself but rather some external thing. Judging by "painful experience" I assume kidney stones, which could be caused by too much calcium or genetic preference. not a doctor or an expert on the topic though, just open for a discussion :)
- What I wish for would be some kind of frontend for viewing hacker news (specifically the comment section) in a way that imageboards behave. I've never adapted to the reddit-style comment system for two reasons:
1. nested/indented comments are confusing. Perhaps it's connected to how I don't like programming languages that rely on indents for defining blocks of script instead of curly brackets, but I think that the reasons are unrelated. When you have a large tree of comments, it's simply hard to keep track which comment replies to which. It's easy when you have a couple comments, but I simply can't process a large tree of, say, 20 comments, I'll forget the context of the parent by the time I read the 5th one. Also sometimes it's hard to recognize if the next comment is indented 1 or 2 times to the left. I don't know why is this design so popular, someone even wrote a frontpage for 4chan that displayed its posts in this manner. I'd love to have a frontpage for hackernews that displayed its posts like on an imageboard! if you know such, please let me know. At least HN provides the next/prev/parent buttons, but they lack the onhover rendering of the post like on 4chan. These buttons also don't exist on hckrnws.com frontend which I tend to use, but it's a minor nitpick.
2. upvotes. I really like the 4chan way of bumping and making comments with a lot of replies the ones that stand out instead of those that a lot of people agree with. I think it encourages more diverse opinions. But on the other hand, perhaps the upvote system is somehow key to the pretty high level of discussion on HN, can't really tell.
- In the scenario with mailservers with PGP encrypted messages I did intend the messages to be encrypted client side, perhaps it was not clear enough. When I selfhost my own server (and my trusted friend selfhosts his), I can be completely sure that the encrypted messages will not be dumped either through storage or while relaying them. If sent PGP end-to-end encrypted messages through, say, gmail, then I'm not 100% sure that gmail won't store these messages somewhere and decrypt them whenever quantum computing becomes available for them.
- Huh, it's true. I thought an organization that needs $50M yearly to function[1] would employ more people. Still, I think it's fair to call them "pretty big" looking on how much media exposure they get or their operating costs. Perhaps a bit misleading from my part with the "company" part, as I'm not english-native, every type of firm,company,foundation in my head translates to a "company", sorry about that, will be more clear next time :)
- Yeah, that's true. If they did though, then I think that they'd be more secure than with Signal, at least in this certain aspect of message storage.
- My point is that to this date everyone was not post-quantum secure, and only the people whom had their messages stored on their servers only can be sure that someone won't read their contents.
Also PGP emails were just an idea that seemed the most basic for me to illustrate an example of selfhosted encrypted messaging. Probably they lack more security features than just post-quantum, compared to the other messengers anyway :)
- It is possible for them to say that they deleted the messages without actually deleting them though. One has to trust a pretty big company in order to not worry about the messages actually not being stored anywhere.
I'm not aware of all techniques that Signal uses to somehow make the message anonymous even when if the encryption would have been broken, but sealed sender seems to be one of them:
https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
So at least there's that. Unless the encrypted sealed sender messages aren't somehow being fingerprinted by the IP address of client and the timestamps of connections. Signal probably also says that they don't log these, but with self hosted mailserver I wouldn't have to trust them on that too.
- This is actually disturbing, as the article suggests that all previous messages sent using Signal are decryptable with quantum computers. If there are people with, for example, selfhosted mailservers sending PGP encrypted emails to each other, then, while they have to worry about them not leaking out from the server either by someone hacking to it or someone sniffing the traffic with the encrypted messages beforehand, they know for sure that their messages are safe.
Meanwhile Signal users have been sending messages onto signal servers for years now, as far as I know they aren't sent directly through some p2p protocol. I don't know what their policy is about storing messages, and I believe that they have a lot of other countermeasures, but it still points to the problem with Signals centralized nature.