Create a self-hosted chat service with your own Matrix server

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2021-07-21 16:00:11

Matrix is an open standard for decentralized real-time communication. The specification is production-ready and bridges to tons of silo products like Slack, Gitter, Telegram, Discord, and even Facebook Messenger. This lets you use Matrix to link together disjoint communities in one place, or create an alternative communication method that works with, but is independent of, communication silos.

You can create your own self-hosted Matrix chat for as little as $3.50 USD per month on an AWS Lightsail instance. Your homeserver can federate with other Matrix servers, giving you a reliable and fault-tolerant means of communication.

Matrix is most widely installed via its Synapse homeserver implementation written in Python 3. Dendrite, its second-generation homeserver implementation written in Go, is currently released in beta. Dendrite will provide more memory efficiency and reliability out-of-the-box, making it an excellent choice for running on a virtual instance.

Spin up a new Lightsail instance on AWS with Debian as your operating system. It’s a good idea to create a new per-instance key for use with SSH. You can do this by with the SSH key pair manager on the instance creation page. Don’t forget to download your private key and .gitignore your secrets.