Ran a homeserver for 5 years on a minimal VPS and it worked fine. Upsides - works everywhere, self hosted, feature complete. Client software in the ecosystem mostly felt bloated, with the exception of NeoChat. By 2022 the clients could no longer call each other. Decommissioned it this year in favor of traditional XMPP which works fine and it's nice that notifications are appropriately processed, finally.

Our team highly appreciates the work done in Matrix it's just unfortunate that the elephant in the room was never addressed at the start of the project, which is the need for a -simple- first-party administrative dashboard or tool to manage users, storage, and configuration. Without that core component, then you've got a layer of complexity between an admin and an audit which will increase likelihood of misconfiguration or resource management issues.

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Arathorn 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We did address the elephant eventually with https://github.com/element-hq/element-admin a few months ago.

In terms of VoIP interop - yes, one of the worst bits of Matrix is that the legacy 1:1 VoIP calling is not interoperable with MatrixRTC-based (multiparty) VoIP calling, but we ran out of time/cash to implement interop and instead focused on making MatrixRTC work well. (Does XMPP give you E2EE multiparty calling ooi?)

	▲	The_President 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Thank you Aaron for the direct response. Glad to see the central interface for administrative use. Haven't had the need to use the calling feature in a while. One of the hurdles with the Rust client on Fdroid was it was too new for the OS on the device it needed to be used on, but on iOS it was a performance improvement. One of the genius ideas behind Element was the ecosystem of clients services that attach to rooms, and in some cases XMPP does not reach those expectations. I do plan on a redeployment soon after creating a new technical scope for its use. I like what I can observe of the new admin interface. I hope it can come to include security and configuration check guidances to provide tools for admins of all skillsets to properly configure their servers, and related TURN-or-not and storage. Matrix is bigtime like XMPP - I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon. Thankful for all that it has provided to our organizations.
	▲	The_President 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Another cashflow idea, as if you don't think of many yourself: A white-label version of Element (called something else) that can be deployed as scoped to an organization and based on an LTS release schedule. We'd gladly pay for this.

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ekjhgkejhgk 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thanks for mentioning XMPP. I never ran a server, but as a user I've been enjoying it. Also has its problems - for example, I picked some server to create my first account, and the other day the server disappeared for 6 hours. What do normal users (i.e. non-newbies like me) do in practice in these situations?

That said, I would love to hear your experience running an XMPP server. Do you still run it?

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The_President 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I want to give credit, and that is the early rust iOS version of Element X I tried was very slick and quick, but I didn't try it for long.