I tried to adopt matrix for our small business and here is summary of my experience.
- Synapse is very resource hungry even for a small server
- Synapse creates a gazillion of TCP connection and keep them open, it was a real problem for my ISP router (SOHO router for 1gbit/s) and it took a very long time to debug, be sure to limit the number of TCP connection on the server
- Synapse is hard to get a good idea of the health of the server, the federation can break without warning
- If the federation broke for some reason, when submitting messages, they will show as delivered, this was one of the major problem for us
- Encryption is very cumbersome to get right for non technical users, there should be a server wide option to make it "easier but less secure". Even for me, it was hard to get rid of a warning popup about some device error.
- Group VOIP is hard to setup, it should be as easy as discord to be viable.
- Webhook is really hard to setup too, I want to be able to right click a channel and "copy webhook URL" to be able to post to it with CURL (discord has that)
- Globally it is very slow when joining federated rooms, it can take days to sync 500+ people room
In the end we just use discord, it's free and do the job. Of course they can read our messages and this is a problem for me as I am for privacy and encryption, but it works for everybody, it is friendly and easy to use.
I will keep a close eye on matrix and try to adopt it again, but right now it is not usable for us.
- Synapse is very resource hungry even for a small server
- Synapse creates a gazillion of TCP connection and keep them open, it was a real problem for my ISP router (SOHO router for 1gbit/s) and it took a very long time to debug, be sure to limit the number of TCP connection on the server
- Synapse is hard to get a good idea of the health of the server, the federation can break without warning
- If the federation broke for some reason, when submitting messages, they will show as delivered, this was one of the major problem for us
- Encryption is very cumbersome to get right for non technical users, there should be a server wide option to make it "easier but less secure". Even for me, it was hard to get rid of a warning popup about some device error.
- Group VOIP is hard to setup, it should be as easy as discord to be viable.
- Webhook is really hard to setup too, I want to be able to right click a channel and "copy webhook URL" to be able to post to it with CURL (discord has that)
- Globally it is very slow when joining federated rooms, it can take days to sync 500+ people room
In the end we just use discord, it's free and do the job. Of course they can read our messages and this is a problem for me as I am for privacy and encryption, but it works for everybody, it is friendly and easy to use.
I will keep a close eye on matrix and try to adopt it again, but right now it is not usable for us.