I admire your perseverance, I gave up on Matrix personally. When was the last time you had a shot at XMPP? Have you tried ejabberd? That's probably one of the most "fire and forget" services I sysadmin, and it does everything out of the box as a single server (STUN/TURN, audio/video calls, …). That's refreshing.
Thanks for the suggestion, I am looking at it now - for some reason my first scan of the first page about it found on DDG I was convinced it was a non-self-hosted 'service' only.
Then a downloads page (which I clicked to wonder if it was 'you need a client to interact with our cloud service' kind of page.. seems to point to self hosting as an option - so I will give this a go.
I recently gave a presentation for another biz about chat community options. During the research I stumbled upon rocket chat with a totally grown up look and feel quite shockingly, and found trillian.im as possible self host contenders.
There were a couple others but some things in my features matrix made them less likely as a replacement for matrix as an option for those needs.
I'm still hopeful for matrix to become easier to deploy and easier to use, as it has real potential.
One reason wordpress got so popular is it's famous 5 minute install; and that was doing it manually.
Any noob can rent a $10 shared host, login to cpanel (or other panel these days) and click a button that installs wordpress, it's needed DB, creates the admin and emails you the details. Up an running in seconds.
somebody get matrix to run via one click with softalicious / fantistico like abilities please!
Of course wordpress benefits from lots of paid addons (for hundreds of developers not just wp/automattic) and a healthy 'pay for development ecosystem' - but most of that grew from the ease of install (and at the time lots of fancy free themes that were subsidized from many groups with different reasons).
With matrix I wish there was a chart of wanted features / fixes and people could escrow vote with dollars for things and they get released to everyone.
I think I group funded a feature for rocket chat years ago with options via bug county source? Something like that.
I also think Matrix would be better as a no federated self hosted install and connect some sort of bridge on a different server if someone wants to connect the federated stuff - less complaints and support issues with being bogged down.
The agony of trying to install has made me find other things to do so I can avoid having to do it this weekend, and I should of redone it last weekend. sigh.
> I'm still hopeful for matrix to become easier to deploy and easier to use, as it has real potential.
I mean, I'm admittedly biased here, but the "easy to deploy, $10 shared host IM" already exists and is XMPP. Matrix is doomed to be inefficient, and that's baked at the protocol level. It won't ever get easy and cheap to deploy and run, judging from the recent year's trajectory, with more and more components being added to the mix.
> somebody get matrix to run via one click with softalicious / fantistico like abilities please!
> I also think Matrix would be better as a no federated self hosted install and connect some sort of bridge on a different server if someone wants to connect the federated stuff
Another software delivering a slack-lite experience geared towards corporations is prose: https://prose.org/ it's also XMPP, their client can be used with ejabberd but they have an easy-deployment bundle that ships Prosody instead (yeah, unlike the Matrix ecosystem, XMPP has multiple completely viable and compatible implementations, ejabberd and prosody being only the two most popular).
