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Matrix is a protocol. Servers are horrible to set up and you have to find federations to join.

Telegram, Signal and others are centralized, so you join one, you're a member of all.



Actually setting up a server is not difficult. Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDddKmdLEdg for setting one up with video conferencing.

Finding a server is not difficult - in the worst case you take the default server.

And given the server is not locked down, you have access to all other servers (and their users) as well. So I don't really get where you are going with this.


> Actually setting up a server is not difficult.

And yet you point me to a YouTube video, rather than a link on their website.

The documentation itself strongly encourages setting up your own server to have your own user information and then federating into a system, and yet, the documentation doesn't seem to describe, in friendly terms, how to do that.

It might be easy to set up, but I've had trouble discovering all of that in their documentation.


> and yet, the documentation doesn't seem to describe, in friendly terms, how to do that.

I've gotten mixed signals from matrix people on this.

On one hand, they discourage people that aren't skilled in sys admin work to set up a server. On the other hand, they emphasize the simplicity of setting up a server and want as many as possible.

I tend to think that the mixed signals are due to the fact that they sell matrix in a SAAS business model[1], so they want it to be difficult in some ways, but easy in others.

[1]: https://element.io/matrix-services


> And yet you point me to a YouTube video, rather than a link on their website.

So you can see it

> and yet, the documentation doesn't seem to describe, in friendly terms, how to do that.

mind to expand that?


Watching that video now.

I can say, without a doubt and with great seriousness, that if you have any control over their documentation process, in the "getting started" and "setting up synapse for yourself" pages, that video should ABSOLUTELY be a part of that. It is orders of magnitude easier to follow.

> mind to expand that?

Imagine you don't know how to use nginx.

Okay, now try to read ANYTHING in any of the numerous github .md files.

Then, just start with this page:

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse

What's Synapse? You know, I know now; but, where on that page does it say what Synapse is?

On basically every tutorial page, I think there's value in asking "okay, what do I need to know to understand this page?" If the knowledge is important and takes more than a click or maybe two to get that answer, it's too far away for most people, I think.

Again, the YouTube video walking through the steps with the guy talking is AMAZING. I've learned more listening to this than any number of web pages attempting to describe it.

Edit: I find the federation documentation to be very confusing, as well: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/develop/docs/fede...




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