For many years now I’ve been looking for a place for private family discussions that was for the most part under our control. Sure, Signal is private but I wanted to have a system that I could more directly interact with yet that allowed for e2e encryption where needed. At first I thought about just setting up an XMPP server but since there are now competing systems for e2e encryption there and no decent iOS or macOS client, I quickly gave up.
Chaos congresses and FOSDEMs came and went and I still hadn’t found a solution I was happy with but Matrix became more and more interesting. It’s rather new compared to XMPP but I really like the idea of treating chats like state containers that are modified by events. Having those events never actually leave a home server if all participants are located there is even better for my use-case. Oh, and I like that Riot.im is a decent client that I can use pretty much whatever platform I’m working on.
When COVID-19 happened and all of a sudden we were constrained to our own four walls I decided to just re-use one of my DigitalOcean instances, set up some disk encryption and deploy Synapse, the reference implementation for a Matrix home server, onto it.
On March 28 I was finally happy enough with the setup that I invited my partner onto it and we’ve been using it ever-since without any relevant downtime or issues so far. At this point I’m happy enough with it that I will probably also start to invite other family members. Let’s see how it goes 😅
As for the setup itself:
- A 2GB droplet on DigitalOcean (referral link) with Ubuntu
- The latest Synapse release
- PostgreSQL 11 as data store
- Nginx as ingress proxy with Certbot for fetching TLS certificates from Let’s Encrypt
That’s pretty much it. Nothing fancy and not a lot of customisation yet but it has worked quite well so far 🙂 There was also surprisingly little configuration needed to get this working. Thankfully, there is even a script that converts a SQLite database (default configuration for Synapse) into a PostgreSQL one. If you have a spare VM somewhere (or one with enough capacity for another application running on) give it a try 🙂
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