<story><title>Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal</title><url>https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10216-the-hidden-drawbacks-of-p2p-and-a-defense-of-signal</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gorgonzolachz</author><text>Can anyone chime in on their experiences hosting a synapse server? I have close to a dozen people on mine (although we don&amp;#x27;t federate much with the network as a whole, I set it up initially for a couple of groupchats&amp;#x2F;DMs with friends) and I&amp;#x27;m not even close to hitting the limits of the $5&amp;#x2F;mo Digitalocean server I put it on. Does federating with the greater Matrix ecosystem cost that much extra processing power, that one user&amp;#x27;s chats are taking multiple gigs of RAM and gigabytes of space? It looks like the author&amp;#x27;s using multiple bridges, which could be a problem, but my understanding is that bridges are separate programs that hook into synapse via an API.&lt;p&gt;I will agree that voip&amp;#x2F;video isn&amp;#x27;t there yet, tried it with some friends and none of us could get anything working. I did go out and set up a TURN server afterwards, but once a piece of tech fails as badly as element did for us the damage is done. E2EE could definitely be done better as well, but in another post on here I saw a comment detailing a bunch of clients (many of which were abandonware) that didn&amp;#x27;t support E2EE at all. That&amp;#x27;s going to kill mass adoption, since you have no idea how many people are on those zombie clients that you still need to support. I wonder if the Matrix API has a way to define versions for these purposes, to advertise the highest supported version by both the client and server?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sweden</author><text>I have been running my own Matrix instance with federation on my 20 dollar&amp;#x2F;month Linode VPS for 5 years already.&lt;p&gt;I use between some friends and family and I&amp;#x27;m also connected to massive channels like the official &amp;quot;Element Android&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Element Web&amp;#x2F;Desktop&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;And it runs... just fine. The server can be a bit performance hungry but I also host plenty of other services on my VPS (email, HTTP server, Seafile, VPN, etc) and I never noticed any degradation in performance in any of them.&lt;p&gt;They have been making a lot of progress in improving the performance of the Synapse server and it is very usable now. And it is not difficult to configure at all, it&amp;#x27;s easier than configuring Prosody.&lt;p&gt;I would say that the bottleneck now is more about improving the UX and the Voip capabilities of the clients.</text></comment>
<story><title>Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal</title><url>https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10216-the-hidden-drawbacks-of-p2p-and-a-defense-of-signal</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gorgonzolachz</author><text>Can anyone chime in on their experiences hosting a synapse server? I have close to a dozen people on mine (although we don&amp;#x27;t federate much with the network as a whole, I set it up initially for a couple of groupchats&amp;#x2F;DMs with friends) and I&amp;#x27;m not even close to hitting the limits of the $5&amp;#x2F;mo Digitalocean server I put it on. Does federating with the greater Matrix ecosystem cost that much extra processing power, that one user&amp;#x27;s chats are taking multiple gigs of RAM and gigabytes of space? It looks like the author&amp;#x27;s using multiple bridges, which could be a problem, but my understanding is that bridges are separate programs that hook into synapse via an API.&lt;p&gt;I will agree that voip&amp;#x2F;video isn&amp;#x27;t there yet, tried it with some friends and none of us could get anything working. I did go out and set up a TURN server afterwards, but once a piece of tech fails as badly as element did for us the damage is done. E2EE could definitely be done better as well, but in another post on here I saw a comment detailing a bunch of clients (many of which were abandonware) that didn&amp;#x27;t support E2EE at all. That&amp;#x27;s going to kill mass adoption, since you have no idea how many people are on those zombie clients that you still need to support. I wonder if the Matrix API has a way to define versions for these purposes, to advertise the highest supported version by both the client and server?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seusscat</author><text>I have been running a Synapse instance for nearly 3 years now. My instance is not for open registration but just for family and friends, currently it has around 7 users on it and federates with the rest of the Matrix ecosystem. I also have some experience writing apps that use the Matrix APIs.&lt;p&gt;The federation API on matrix is a little too chatty for my taste. But that in itself causes no problems. The problems start when a user on your homeserver joins a massive room on any other homeserver. Most commonly these are the bug rooms on matrix.org. Once someone joins one such room, synapse will start slowing down and taking tons of RAM. This has significantly improved in the last year, by huge leaps and bounds. It however does remain a memory hungry process.&lt;p&gt;VoIP &amp;#x2F; video on the other hand has been a success story for me. 1:1 calls run smoothly after installing a TURN server. Me and my users use the calling functionality multiple tines a day and don&amp;#x27;t seem to have any problems with it.</text></comment>