Basically for a cloud provider s3 storage is just any storage. It’s not a disk that needs to be high availability with programs reading and writing to it with an OS on top, its just blobs of data. Images, video, isos, whatever. Its meant for access that is lower than what a VM would need for an active program.

For matrix this is ideal for its content. An image uploaded will be read a fee dozen times, and then less and less until eventually it isn’t really needed ever unless someone scrolls and scrolls up.

So for hosting, if you store that on a disk you’re saying “this is critical to the operation of the software and must be highly available and optimized for vms reading and writing to it.”. Think like m.2 ssds. Blob storage then analogous to us home labbers to throwing it on a giant nas. Its there, may take a bit to load, but its there.

Then s3 has classes too, where if you need your data even less you can pay even less trading off access times, you can get even better rates if you know you need it extremely infrequently, like audit logs. Tape drives are actually used quite a bit for those opt-in low access tiers because if you think about it the data storage is incredibly dense, but opening up a tape can be minutes or longer to access. No problem if you’re pulling up some archive from 20 years ago.

If you’re running locally on your own system then yes you can use your own. You can use something like MinIO or Garage to self-host an S3 bucket, and then point Matrix to that

Docs would be helpful, I can’t find much of anything, I think you honestly did the best writeup.

Star Trek quotes is hilarious and perfect!

I’m not sure your level of understanding of cloud infrastructure, so let me know if you need me to go into more detail. Disk storage, like what is attached to a VPS/VM is very expensive, and it’s the 100GB drive you have attached. What is much cheaper is object/blob storage, known in AWS and most cloud providers as S3. This is far far cheaper for many reasons.

Matrix (and really I should say Synapse, what I use) can be configured to save images, photos, uploads, etc to save to a blob storage “bucket” instead of disk. So you can lower your disk from 100 down to something lower because your data is stored in blob storage (fully encrypted). For synapse, the module you need is here: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse-s3-storage-provider

Thank you! I’m going to start playing with this and see what I can figure out! I’ll be referencing this frequently!

How do you do that, I’m very interested! Also good to see you Admiral!

Ah shit sorry OP you might have received my package, I specifically ordered titties

You can set it to use object storage instead, much cheaper

My friend group has already moved to Matrix, and we’ve been happy

I Will never understand why the open source community hates the GPL license. Maybe they just haven’t seen themselves how big corporations taking advantage of free individual independent developers. I still remember the core.js developer, whose code is in pretty much every giant framework out there basically begging for any sort of income for his work while his family was going hungry in Eastern Europe. Angular, react, all major frameworks absolutely depend on it and never gave them anything.

They always forget that others deserve to have places without cars. Seriously why do they need to drive through a park. It’s a park.

But that’s not decentralized. It’s the same as discord, only instead of a corporation now you have a server admin.

I completely support you moving off of Discord, and I completely support you setting up Matrix. I tried a lot, I think it has the most feature parity. That being said, the biggest thing I regret when setting it up is that I went with Synapse for my backend Matrix server, when there are others.

I’ve heard very good things about Conduit (https://conduit.rs/), mostly that it’s easier to stand up and easier to maintain.

Either way, I think it’s a smart move, and it’s worth the investment. It’s not the easiest to stand up, but operationally our communication should be our own. Expect trial and error, getting one piece up and running, then the next, and then the next. Celebrate small wins like “Today I got it running” and then “Today I got federation working”, and then “Now I have voice working!”. Otherwise it’s going to feel overwhelming.

I believe in the cause, so feel free to DM me if you have any questions, or send me a DM on Matrix :)

Oh, and a very useful tool - https://federationtester.matrix.org/

This will tell you exactly what is wrong with your federation.

That’s too bad, that’s a hard line for me, it has to have the option of federation.

Also, so it’s a direct server, so it is centralized, there’s nothing decentralized about it

Decentralized (no abuse of power and doesn’t have a single point of failure)

There is a direct server though, is it federated? The readme doesn’t say it’s federated at all

nerd herd

I understood that reference!

I’ve heard positive things about Dito, if I was doing it over again I think I’d start there

Okay? Glad our happiness has brought you joy in some way?

Pretty much this. It really comes down to do you want to make a lifelong commitment to your partner? If the answer is anything except “absolutely” then it’s either you’re not ready, or it’s not for you, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I was with my partner for almost a decade before we were married, we decided to mostly because “of course we’re going to be together, neither of us can imagine a different life”. So we made it official.

Can confirm, I host Matrix (homeserver synapse) and Element. Voice is a pain to get set up but I hear there are other matrix services which will do this for you easier. It’s a process though. You can get text chat up in a day, voice is going to be a bit after that, a lot of tinkering.

They’ve been spamming this a few times now, fully respect your decision, but I know I commented on this exact post about 2 weeks ago the same as everyone else here, just FYI if you didn’t know they’ve been repeating it. (Maybe it was an alt acct, not sure, but I know I said the same thing before)