Loomio
Fri 11 May 2018 12:16AM

Setting up a matrix homeserver for the social dot coop

DU greg Public Seen by 26

Hi all! I want to set up a matrix homeserver for social.coop. I've been meaning to play around with matrix for awhile now, and this seems like the perfect opportunity to do so. I was planning on just selfhosting it myself, since the server costs are free, but I'd need to get a subdomain pointed at my ip and i'm not sure who I should talk to about that. I was thinking either chat.social.coop or matrix.social.coop, although I don't really have a preference.

As for the financial aspect, I'm more than happy to host it for free for now, since it doesn't cost me anything besides the time it takes to set it up and I wanna learn the nitty gritty of the matrix protocol anyways. If it blows up and everyone starts using it, we can figure out a more permanent hosting setup then, but there's not much of a point in hashing all that out before we even know if people will use it.

ps: this is my first loomio thread and i'm still gettin the hang of it, so apologies if i forgot to do something or did something wrong.

LW

Liaizon Wakest Fri 11 May 2018 1:25PM

That would be incredible. I wonder if we can just use the mastodon accounts as OpenID type logins for Matrix. Haven't looked into whether anyone has created a system like that yet for Riot but I assume someone is probably working on it.

MK

Michele Kipiel Fri 11 May 2018 1:30PM

hooking this up with our membership database/app so that members have the same username on Matrix as they have on Mastodon

This would be awesome!

S

spudboy Fri 1 Jun 2018 5:53PM

matrix supports ldap, not sure about mastodon

S

spudboy Fri 1 Jun 2018 5:54PM

i'd also suggest using the open source integration manager Dimension, rather than the default one. i'm a pretty active matrix user, feel free to ping me with any questions

AR

Antoine-Frédéric Raquin Wed 6 Jun 2018 11:12AM

Why not a rocket.chat server? Unless you want federation with other servers, I don't really see the point of Matrix over rocket.chat here.

I don't understand if we're doing this for internal use or to discuss with everyone, but if the latter were correct I'd probably give it a try.

S

spudboy Fri 8 Jun 2018 8:11PM

federation would be important because it connects us to the wider world

LW

Liaizon Wakest Fri 8 Jun 2018 9:41AM

@gregcerna were you still wanting to do this?

S

spudboy Fri 8 Jun 2018 8:12PM

i'd be willing to spend time and effort on the matrix server. i would like our eventual Code of Conduct to apply to matrix too, I don't like the idea of willingly hosting hate speech or other extreme content.

DU

greg Sun 10 Jun 2018 6:16PM

sorry it took so long (shit hit the fan at my housing co-op this past month, and i've been dealing with the fallout) but I finally got a test matrix synapse server up and running and successfully federating!

the web client (riot) url is https://chat.socialcoop.frenchha.us (sign up here)
the matrix server url is https://matrix.socialcoop.frenchha.us

this is just a test server, since you can't change the server url once you've started to federate. we'll have to start fresh when we switch urls to chat.social.coop, so in the meantime, feel free to create an account, try out riot (or any other client), and explore the matrixverse!

DU

greg Sun 10 Jun 2018 6:31PM

also, re: rocketchat - i'm already hosting four different rocketchats lol, for different houses/groups within ICC, but I'd be happy to host another one (rocketchat is super lightweight) and can probs set up a new one in under an hour if you'd like to try that out too. the rocketchat interface (rocketchat is an unabashed slack clone) is waaaay better than riot's godawful UI, but it lacks federation, which is frustrating. there were plans to federate using the matrix protocol (https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat.Federation) but it hasn't been touched in awhile. if i had to guess why, i'd say it was because the rocketchat team has been super focused on improving the quality of their ios/android apps - they've gone from pretty terrible a couple months ago to surprisingly pretty solid - which, imo, was the right choice, because federation doesn't matter if no one wants to use it, and riot's overengineered UI makes wide adoption of matrix beyond nerds a non-starter.