Matrix on Raspberry Pi
Matrix on Raspberry Pi
Hi! I've done some research on self hosting Matrix for Matrix Bridges on a Raspberry Pi 5. Some people have said online that Matrix will be too beefy for an RPI due to large federated chatrooms and information. However, would it still be worthwhile installing just for my own bridges for social media, and maybe as a secure way for friends to interact?
Thanks in advance!
Not that the raspberry pi is particularly low end anymore, but if you do want to run matrix on low end hardware you may want to avoid synapse as it is very resource heavy.
There are a couple implementations that support bridges here
Uhm, this is not very good advise, as the bridges especially often do not work well with non-Synapse homeserver implementations. And especially Conduit also has a very different way to setup appservices, so it becomes much harder to configure the bridges correctly.
Matrix needs fast storage, and a lot of it, even if you only use it for bridges. A RPi5 with a good amount of NVMe storage will probably work, but if you only want to use it for bridges I would rather recommend to set up an XMPP server with Slidge which gives you better clients and can run on a RPi4 easily.
How much is "a good amount"
Completely depends on your use, but it is basically ever growing and larger than the typical cheap VPS includes. A few tens of GBs at least.
If it was the pi 4, I would agree, but the Pi 5 would probably handle less than 20 people. I have a 4 that uses Yunohost that covers a LOT of services. I played around with matrix but it required too much out of the system. But that's with a lot of other services running. Give it a shot and let the rest of us know.
BTW I had a lemmy/irc/bookwyrm/mastodon all running on the pi4 without any real issues. Mastodon is probably the beefiest/slowest app, and its been getting better as time goes on. So a PI can definitely work with fediverse apps.
Yeah, I literally have a wordpress with broken federation running, along with a VPN. It's quite good
Not sure if that's true. I've ran a Synapse Matrix server on a SBC before and it worked. Just for a few users though. I don't know if it breaks if you have like 300 people using that...
You could use conduit.rs as a server. That runs on a few tens of megabytes of RAM. Not a whopping gigabyte. At least that's what I'm using now. It's still missing a few features, though.
Funnily enough I considered that, but I literally couldn't find installation instructions anywhere on their site. The documentation has stuff for configuring a running instance but nothing for actually installing it, lmao
If you end up going with conduit, I would instead use conduwuit. More development effort and better docs IMO. I think maybe even one of the main devs from conduit moved over to conduwuit? But not 100% sure
https://conduwuit.puppyirl.gay/
The domain choice? Eh, not what I would have gone with but to each their own lol
Yeah. Their documentation is a bit "lacking" so to say... it's practically nonexistent.
They follow the usual procedure, though. So if you already set up 10 webservices on your server, you will know what to do. They documented a few special things like how to hook the appservices. But also that took me some trial and error.
I believe it's more for developers at this point. And people with a lot of expertise. That may change. And it already works well for the basic stuff. But i'm not sure if I'd recommend it unless it's a special case like this.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol ('Jabber') for open instant messaging
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 16 acronyms.
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From my limited Raspberry PI experience I believe their single core performance isn't great and synapse at least is single threaded. You'd have to use workers to utilize the other cores. If you have multiple pi devices you could also utilize workers on different pis and hosting postgres on one. Using only one, it would likely be quite slow like others noted.