Since Discord is doing uh discord lmao I think having a Matrix server would be smart. Anyone else support the idea?
What’s Matrix, some kind of self-hosted model for VoIP and messaging?
Initially, I was thinking a Discord to Matrix bridge might be the way to go - that would help prevent community fragmentation. It seems that costs associated with running a bridge have caused Matrix.org to consider shutting down their bridges if funding can’t be found.
Ugh… ok Matrix, we didn’t even wanted to invite you to our party anyway 
I think it would be wise to search for a possible alternative in case things go awry, nonetheless
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For my own community I am looking at running a Matrix server in parallel to my Discord.
Once I get that going on my server, I could add an unofficial Panzer Dragoon room and see what the interest for it is.
No promises on a timeline here though, as my Uni will keep me busy with cloud deployment assignments this semester and setting up Matrix is even more of that.
Matrix is an interesting system, quite different from Discord in how it works.
Like Mastodon you can sign on to any of the larger providers and use that account on any server (though matrix.org through app.element.io is most common).
You have to subscribe to every single chatroom you want to see manually.
But once subscribed, the Element, NeoChat, Nheko and similar clients do resemble Discord.
Thunderbird and other clients are more IRC-esque and do not sort rooms per server.
Stoat (formerly Revolt) is more similar, looks like a pain to host for me as it uses 11 (!) subservices on top of the main server.
I think it tries to be a 1:1 replacement for Discord, including many of the optional features which are handled client side for Matrix.
As far as I know all the other Discord like projects, like Fluxer, seem to immature to host without significant commitment.
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This sounds useful as an alternative/backup to our current Discord community. Hosting the channel independently is also more inline with Matrix’s decentralised approach and is something I would support.
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Having used Matrix more now and gotten more familiar with the platform, I learned a few things about it.
For federated rooms it actually does not matter much what homeserver it is created on.
All servers participating in the federation hold the data and the room alias can be changed any time.
But I still intend to wait until I am less busy with uni assignments and have my own server going properly before I set up a Panzer Dragoon space.
This as it is important to have at least one participating server which does not aggressively clears media or even messages, for long-term persistence.
Others are welcome to beat me to the punch and set up a space already of course.
Room event (message) loading performance is much better on Continuwuity (or similar) homeservers, which is a factor of both these servers being smaller and the software more responsive.
I currently use an account on federated.nexus, which has solved the extremely slow message loads I had with a matrix.org account.
The better clients seem to be Cinny/Sable, Gomuks Web, SchildiChat Next and maybe FluffyChat.
These again are more responsive and intuitive than Element/Riot and this selection is similarly feature-complete.
Though I personally like NeoChat for chatting (but not administration, here it causes problems) and Commet looks very interesting too.
Due to the federation rooms can feel buggy or be extremely slow on some homeservers.
But it seems nearly as performant as Discord on federating Continuwuity servers.
Though the tradeoff is needing to work around some administrative quirks of this newer software.
In that case, would there be any advantage to self-hosting over using matrix.org? Using an existing provider might be a safer long term solution for the community, as admins could come and go without worrying about hosting costs and upgrades.
Note that I am still learning about these things, so there might be some inaccuracies.
But the advantages are:
- Not being rate- and upload-limited by the free Matrix.org homeserver tier, which makes room joins process extremely slow and caps accounts at 500MB per month, including URL embed cache.
- Having the majority of federation ran on Continuwuity servers in stead of Synapse ones early on makes the rooms much more responsive and scrolling through message history reasonably fast.
- For longevity, ensuring that at least one server in the federation is configured not to purge media in the community.
By contrast, from what I have heard Matrix.org purges media after only a week. - The irrevocable founder admin account and moderation bot with admin access can not be taken over by a 3rd party homeserver admin, while the space admins already have this level of access to begin with.
Normal admins can be demoted, but the current room protocol requires tombstoning a room and starting fresh to change the hardcoded founder account. - Before inviting people over, on a self-hosted server the room can be checked and configured with admin level commands, without taking the time of a busy if at all available admin and still allowing for signification changes.
Reasons it does not matter are:
- Once accounts from more homeservers start participating, those servers will also host a copy of the room data, making the starting servers matter less.
- For the same reason, if the starting homeserver goes down, the room will persist over the other participating homeservers, but at the cost of possible gaps in message history and stored media.
- Once there are multiple admins across homeservers, these can still modify the state of the federated rooms with or without the original server or it’s founder accounts.
These it does not matter points require the server to have been going for a while, but it does not matter much if it started on a community server like federated.nexus (which I use as my primary now) or my own wyvern.red (once I get it going).
I do not know how responsive smaller Synapse homeservers are, it is also a fairly new thing that these faster alternative Rust servers are viable for federation.
But these vertically scaled Rust servers do target smaller communities like this, whereas Synapse is meant as a horizontally scaled corporate focused thing.
And Matrix itself scales horizontally through the homeservers as the community grows, though federation gets slower from the massive mesh of connections.
Perhaps good to note again, federated rooms and spaces have their data shared across all participating homeservers, to the extend that members requested this data.
So communities survive the death of a server, as mentioned above at the possible cost of gaps in history, which might be slow to (hours to days) or never backfill.
But accounts are tied to specific homeservers, so once a homeserver dies, it takes it’s accounts with it.
So for contingency it is important to have a few admin accounts across trusted homeservers, for which I would use my federated.nexus and matrix.org accounts.
Gamers Nexus did a vid recently that was useful. Never heard of Mattermost but boy am I going to avoid them lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpjcmXbmMVM
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Consider this a beta-test still, but I went ahead and made a Matrix space.
I called it Sestren, you can join it at #sestren:wyvern.red.
If it works okay for members I will probably make a dedicated post about this space, if this is fine by @Solo_Wing.
While my wyvern.red domain is in the current identifiers of these rooms and the space, it is not tied to my server otherwise (and this can be moved).
Any homeserver used to join this space will hold a copy of the data, as far as the user looked.
But my server is configured for longer (Discord-like) media retention and will host ACL and moderation bots if those become needed.
Moderators of the Forum or Discord are welcome to ask for moderation privileges if this goes anywhere and they feel the desire to help out.
But this is a community separate from Panzer Dragoon Legacy, currently under my ownership and overarching Matrix space.
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Nice to have a backup chat room. I’ve joined, but I’m not sure how active I’ll be over the long term.
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