(please let me know if this should be in the Help category instead)
I’ve been looking into other chat service options lately, and since Matrix keeps popping up I decided I wanted to try it out…but I’m dumb and I don’t even know where to start, mainly what homeserver I should register on, or at least which ones I shouldn’t or ones that have a bad vibe that I’m not aware of. I’ve looked at a couple of general public ones, and I’m leaning towards The Apothecary, BUT TL;DR I wanted to see if any members of the cafe had any they’d recommend, because it would also be nice to join a space with familiar faces. :>
Also, I know Matrix isn’t necessarily a full replacement for things like Telegram/Discord (my main chat programs right now, which both have their issues I’d like to distance myself from), but I guess I just wanna try and expand my horizons. I feel kind of alienated by the fediverse a bit, and I want to come to understand it a lot better so that it feels less like a clique I’m not smart enough to join.
Heya, I’m not too clued up on Matrix so not a lot of help. There have been a few people surf through our community who are into Matrix but not sure if they’re active on the forums.
It’s a good question as it’s quite the point with decentralized tools : the ability to choose a server. And it’s cool not to use matrix.org server as a default (because otherwise it’s re-centralized !).
Maybe You’ve already checked, but there’s a list of open access Matrix servers on this site: https://servers.joinmatrix.org
I’m using Matrix since ~3 years as we started hosting an instance with club1.fr. As admin, like many Web services open to registration, the quantity of bots, abuses and missuses may be a bit discouraging . Maybe someday we will switch to invitation system. But for now we are happy to create a possible entry point for new comers.
I think people chooses to create their account on our server mostly because of location (we are in France).
Things to consider could be:
server location
email requirement
message and media retention time (for example on club1 server it’s 3/2 years)
remote room complexity limit: this limit joining “too complex” remote rooms. In our case, it’s set to 10 (otherwise, people joining > 10 000 users room just killed our server)
I use envs.net, it’s a pubnix (public access Unix system) and also offers other services. It’s also listed on 32bit.cafe. Its matrix server had been up for about 4 years as far as I know, I love the community.
If you don’t mind paying for web services, omg.lol, which provides various web services, has its own Matrix homeserver that is bridged with other chat services it supports including Discord, IRC and, XMPP.
Disclosure: I am a member of omg.lol, but not under my Leilukin pseudonym.
. Maybe someday we will switch to invitation system. But for now we are happy to create a possible entry point for new comers.