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What is a service you host you never knew you needed?
(k.fe.derate.me)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2025
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I'm hodsting my own Matrix server with WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord (you don't need a bot for that, you can just share your login with the bridge) and Messenger bridge. I have all my IMs in one app, don't have to install spyware on my phone, and I can make bots that troll annoying people that message me on any platform.
Hosting it was super simple, thanks to the Ansible project that's extremely robust and well done, I literally just got a hosting, domain amd changed like 5 config values to enable the bridges I wanted, gave it an IP and ssh key, and ran it. And if I need to update, I literally "just update" (it's all wrapped up into "just" tool), and it eve handles cases where I didn't update for a while, failing graciously and telling me what I need to do maually, usually just rename some config values.
I wholly recommend it. You probably wont convince your friends to switch from , and this is the best compromise.
I'm using a small instance on Hetzner, for 6$ a month. You could in theory get a free oracle cloud instance for it, but I didn't manage to get one.
And you can easily share it with anyone interrested, make them an account, so they can also consolidate their DMs. I'm sharing it with a few friends and colleagues.
How do you get around the requirement to run the official app somewhere?
I run a WhatsApp and signal bridge, but not recommend running the official app on a phone
Yeah, that part about WhatsApp is annoying. I just have a spearate profile on Graphene that has only WhatsApp installed, and whenever it wants me to refresh a session I just switch to the profile and log in.
Would you recommend the Discord bridge? I've always wanted to install that as well. Is there anything I want to know before putting in the effort to install and configure it?
I use mine for a single channel in a "medium-size" server (~2k people), a friend group server, DMs, and a few channels that follow a bunch of announcement channels on other servers.
Those are certainly valid points. But do I want to care about that? Honest question... Discord also doesn't care about my privacy. Or making the internet a better place. So I think -in turn- I feel quite alright to ignore whatever client they like me to use. And their exact ToS.
What's with the "taxing for large and active Discord servers"? Does it lead to issues if I'm not using their Electron app or website? I can't imagine where this additional strain on their servers would come from?! I run my own homeserver, by the way. So I shouldn't weigh down on anyone else's server...
When you use the official discord client, it only sends to your device whatever chat channel you have open at the time, and when you click on a different channel, it just downloads the last 20 messages, and downloads more when you scroll etc. If you bridge a discord server to a matrix server, it sends all of the contents of all of the channels in real time across. If the server had 50 channels, bridging it to matrix would be the equivalent of you having 50 official clients open, one to each channel. Hence the additional load on discord’s side to send you a lot more data than they usually would.
(Disclaimer: this is all conjecture based on a general understanding of how the systems work, I could be getting some details wrong)
Thanks for explaining. That makes perfect sense. I was under the impression there might be something else.
I'm not interested in forwarding spam in the first place. I don't think I have any use of channels where messages just fly by... So I think I should be safe.
When I was looking into matrix bridges I heard a bunch of stories about people getting their accounts blocked after using them through the bridges. Is this still an issue?
I've been using it for almost a year by now, and so far I didn't have any problems. I've not considered that problem though, so it might be happening and I was just lucky.
Thanks for the report. Do you use the whatsapp bridge? If so, how did you set it up? Emulator?
I use Pixel with GrapheneOS as my phone, and I just have a separate profile that only has WhatsApp installed and nothing else. Since the profiles are completely separated, it doesn't have access to anything else I do on the phone and it's not running in the background (the profiles are basically sandboxed fresh slates, and switching it can be set-up to behave in a same way as basically turning off the phone as far as the profile is concerned).
When the bridge asks me to log in again or refresh a session, I simply switch to the second profile for a minute and re-log in. I've heard iIt might be possible to set up an emulator and leave it running on the server, but that felt like too much effort.
Would you mind sharing the link t the ansible project?
I'm not OP, but maybe this one?
https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
Thank you!
https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
Its pretty well documented and easy to follow, it took me only like an hour to setup.
Thank you!