Matrix is an open protocol for decentralised, secure communications.

Taken from The Matrix Foundation website, I believe in the same things:

We believe:

• People should have full control over their own communication.

• People should not be locked into centralised communication silos, but instead be free to pick who they choose to host their communication without limiting who they can reach.

• The ability to converse securely and privately is a basic human right.

• Communication should be available to everyone as a free and open, unencumbered, standard and global network.

With the recent falls of TG in my country, I have seen people using various ways to bypass the blockage. Me starting to see the application has much-much less useful. And in the crazy-fast development of AI and LLMs world, I feel way too anxiety about them. Not because of the “jobs are going to be taken from IT workers”, but the general thinking of many super-computers scraping everything from humanity knowledged on the internet.

I have tried few other chat softwares, many great products are out there with also comes with Secured (E2EE and such), but recent I landed on Matrix. I have setup a Synapse server in my bedroom for a few days as of writing of this post. There’s pros and cons from that self-host approach.

Some advantages:

• the origin server stay behind CloudFlare Tunnels [using cloudflared] so it bypass the hassles of my CGNAT home network.
• get protected by the advance technology of CF, i don’t liek to praise them that much so down to the disadvantages.

The disadvantages:

• have to do extra steps for the /.well-known/ delegation to work.
• buggy the app as hell sometimes
• the biggest disadvantages is my home network is consumer-grade. the datacenter bros will treat my Matrix server better.

I have had few more ideas of writing, and planned to write in the next few days, there will comes second part of this post. The second part I will tell the story how I setup the stack. There might be someone who needs, good luck self-hosting frens.

Just randomly random sharing.

Thanks for reading!