[gary-kim]

I've been running a Matrix server for a half a year and I have not run into any problems. The main thing that surprised me was how much database space Synapse took on my server but that was an easy enough issue to deal with. That may also have to do with the fact that I'm in some of the most complex rooms that exist on Matrix.

I tried running a XMPP server for a bit but that was a rather frustrating experience between getting it to integrate well with the rest of my infrastructure, figuring out what configuration was needed and what XEPs were needed, what clients had the features I needed, what clients supported the OSes I used, and spam. To be fair, the reason I thought setting up Synapse was extremely easy may have been because I did it with almost twice as much experience with devops than I had when I tried to setup the XMPP server.

Regarding registering with a central authority, you're probably thinking of identity servers. Identity servers are used to provide 3PID (email/phone number) -> Matrix ID mappings and are completely optional. There have been attempts to decentralize that as well but for one reason or another, no good way to do it has been found. At least the source code of the identity server is open source[1] so there is that.

Otherwise, to set up a Matrix server, you simply have to either set up a json response from "/.well-known/matrix/server" or an SRV record on DNS that points to the Matrix server.

[1]: https://github.com/matrix-org/sydent

[southerntofu]

> how much database space Synapse took on my server

Yes this is a common problem, and disk/RAM usage is why many hosting cooperatives have dropped matrix support entirely and come back to Jabber/XMPP ecosystem.

I hope lightweight matrix implementations like dendrite can help improve sysadmin experience and lower hardware requirements. Yet it's unclear so far whether a better implementation will solve all problems, given that the whole decentralized chatroom concept necessarily takes more resources than a federated chatroom alla Jabber/IRC.

To be clear, i'm not advocating against decentralized chatrooms. I believe they are very useful for censorship-resilience (which can also be achieved with eg. nomadic identity though not exactly with the same threat model). I just wish decentralized chatrooms weren't the only option so the matrix protocol would be easier to implement and hosting a server wouldn't need gigabytes of RAM for few users.

> figuring out (...) configuration, (...) XEPs (...), clients and spam

It's not that hard to achieve, but information is sparse and hard to discover. That's one of the reasons we have founded recently the joinjabber.org collective to have a platform centered around the UX of end-users and sysadmins of the Jabber/XMPP network. All feedback/critique/contribution is welcome.