If you’ve been selfhosting conduit or conduwuit, you probabl are aware that the conduwuit project was discontinued a couple months back.
I’ve been holding out on updating my matrix homeserver until it becomes clear which fork(s) will survive long term.
I feel like I can’t put off updating for much longer now, plus the tuwunel nixpkg and -module were merged yesterday, so now the two most promising forks are both options for me.
Still, I’m unsure what route to take. Here’s my thoughts:
- not going through another round of this in a couple of months from now would be great, so stability and long-term maintenance promises would be great
- I assume incompatibility between the forks, if not now then very soon; this is a “pick an option, then stick with it and pray” situation
tuwunelapparently has a full-time paid dev working on it now, which is great; at the same time, that means features will follow the priorities of the (as of now unknown) sponsor of the project- it is, however, the officially endorsed successor
- it also seems like few other people are actively involved, putting in question development practices, reviews, and what happens should the lead dev throw in the towel
- lastly, while there’s been a lot of apparently rapid progress (with releases 1.0.0, 1.1.0, and 1.2.0 at quite a fast pace), the repo itself seems… empty? Few issues, few PRs, commentlessly-deleted issues
- on the other hand,
continuwuityseems more active by commit/contributors count, but is seemingly 100% volunteer work - they do seem to backport
tuwunelchanges and features, which is great! - they are not officially endorsed
In short: I fucking hate community drama. What fork did you go with? Is there anything else to consider? I just want an up-to-date matrix homeserver, and not to have to tell my users “sorry, starting from scratch because we picked the wrong fork…”
After conduwuit died, I just completely stopped using Matrix. I have zero faith in the current developers of these forks to not do the same bullshit that June did.
What do the few people here who stop using Matrix altogether, replace it with? XMPP? Or do you just use Signal or the commercial messengers eveeyone uses?
Understandable.
Gotta be honest, I got fed up and just… shut down my server when conduwuit died. I might come back to matrix if the ecosystem becomes less of a joke, but I’m really not holding my breath about it. Community drama is the worst.
Understandable. Funny thing is, I’m not even federated; I think that keeps me away from a lot of drama.
But yeah. The drama sucks, and so does the Matrix Foundation. So many dumb decisions, so many years old issues that could easily boost acceptance and usability, but… Nah. No better alternatives around though if you want to own your data, have proper multi-client support, and at least the option to federate.
No better alternatives around though if you want to own your data, have proper multi-client support, and at least the option to federate.
What about XMPP? What can Matrix do, that XMPP cant?
Hm, fair enough, I actually have very little experience with XMPP. (Only through prosody, which I personally am on a war footing with.) From a cursory glance, I also couldn’t find an Android lient I’d really want to use, but of course that is subjective.
In any case: I have a matrix server up and running, and it has been a pain to get friends and family on there; I do not want to do all of that again with a new protocol/clients. As long as it’s sustainable, I want to stay with the same server installation, and that means choosing a
conduwuitfor me.Understandable, trying to move friends and family between platforms is an herculean effort.
For everyone else interested in XMPP, you might want to check out:
- Snikket as a Server (intended to run on a cheap VPS): https://snikket.org/service/quickstart/
- Conversations.im as a Client: https://conversations.im/
- ejabberd/prosody if you want to setup your own from scratch
- this compliance scanner which checks for (probably) the most common extensions for a chat server: https://compliance.conversations.im/
I don’t really like synapse, because it performs really bad. But at least it has a stable development. So that’s what I use.
But more and more I’m questioning if matrix is really the federated messaging platform we want. A lot of the drama and development issues of any synapse alternative seem to have their roots in how hard and unsatisfactory is trying to follow the matrix protocol which is subdued to synapse development in a weird form, apparently.
I still use it. But I’m too tired of the drama, and wondering if there’s even a chance for a long term synapse alternative, or if matrix devs are actually doing something that prevents that for ever happening.
Yes, completely agree. It seems that the matrix foundation could easily take a different path to allow the community to flourish and third-party servers to have a much easier time. Since I’m not federated, I wouldn’t even mind if whatever fork I’ll end up on eventually says “fuck this, we’re not following synapse specs any more”.
But yeah, I am sure selling premium accounts on matrix.org is what will save the matrix ecosystem… 🤦🏼♀️
what’s wrong with conduit proper?
There’s nothing technically wrong with it, it’s just a glacial development speed. I tried contributing there myself when I wanted a specific feature (which had been requested years prior by someone else and was deemed a good idea), it took months before I even got a single comment back.
In the meantime, I had switched to
conduwuitbecause it was a much, MUCH more active project. However,conduwuithas diverged substantially fromconduit, including irreconcilable database changes, so it is not possible to migrate back, that would require starting from a fresh slate and loosing all user data.
I only setup my server a month ago. it seemed like continuwuity was the most active so thats what i went with.
Nice, how’s it been going?
I’m in the same boat. Keep me updated if you go forwards. I think I’m going to wait 2 more weeks or so and then make a decision. Community-driven sounds nice. I wasn’t aware of cuntinuwuity yet. And yes, all the drama and burnt-out people isn’t nice or healthy at all. It’s a shame that this is the state of messengers these days.
Roger, will do.
Yeah, community driven sounds like unless there’s new drama. But yeah, currently tending towards continuwuity. Purely vibes based from snooping around both repos.
