Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

Submitted ⁨⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Yaky@slrpnk.net⁩ to ⁨selfhosting@slrpnk.net⁩

https://yaky.dev/2025-11-30-self-hosting-matrix/

Experiences with the Matrix protocol, Matrix Synapse server, bridges, and Element mobile app. There are some you-just-have-to-know-this issues.

TL;DR:

Matrix Synapse: works fine, but requires constant manual maintenance.
Bridges: work pretty well.
Element: generally OK, some issues with timely notifications, no feature parity between Element Classic and Element X, terrible on-boarding (with current setup)

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Comments

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dlsolo@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Man, I really wanted to migrate to Matrix from mattermost but I don’t want or need monthly maintanece. Though it’s probably not that involved, just Wanted Matrix/Synapse option to be the solution… The search continues.

Thanks for taking the time to put your thoughts together.

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- assaultpotato@sh.itjust.works ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I’ve been selfhosting Synapse on Docker Compose for… maybe 1.5 years now? I’m also running bridges. I’ve never had to do monthly maintenance. I have around 20 users (my friends) active daily, a few federated rooms. I have message retention on and it “just worked” for me (not sure why OP had to do extra config)
  
  I only find two of the critiques to be true in my experience:
  
  Onboarding can be confusing for non-technical users. I use SSO so no registration, but the average person doesn’t know what an encryption key is, and they probably don’t want to either.
  
  Synapse is written in python and as such isn’t super kind to memory/cpu. I’m doing fine on my cheap Hetzner box though.
  
  Overall synpase for me has been very much “set it and forget it”. I can’t remember when I last did server maintenance.
  
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- crazyminner@lemmy.ml ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Check out Zulip.
  
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carbs@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I’m curious what maintenance you need to do each month, I’ve been running matrix for well over 5 years and I haven’t done anything other the keep the docker/db containers updated.

Should I have been doing stuff? Now I’m worried.

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- Yaky@slrpnk.net ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  For me, it was not monthly, but rather “when it bites you in the ass”.
  
  Delete all empty rooms and federated rooms without local users.
  
  Clean up state_groups_state table.
  
  Delete old media.
  
  All of this is made worse by having more active users and made better by having a large hard drive (my VPS had 20GB, which I almost filled up with the db and media after a few years, with only few users)
  
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  - carbs@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Ah, makes perfect sense, I don’t use the federation and I’ve got all media on a NAS with 24TB of space, so I’ve not really been concerned with space usage… I might want to do some house keeping at some point though.
    
    Glad I hadn’t missed any major.
    
    Thanks for the reply.
    
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poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Yeah, that is a pretty realistic assessment, and the author should definitely try out Snikket (XMPP).

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