6 months ago, I stood up a #Matrix server using synapse and #OpenBSD as an experiment for Brisbane WICEN.

Matrix is great, feels a lot like Slack in terms of how it operates from the user. The fact it supports end-to-end encryption out-of-the-box is good for those that need that.

Not so great is its insistence that this be mandatory: the user has to be knowledgeable enough to back up their private key somewhere and know how to upload it back in, or have an existing client logged in that can "vouch" for any new client that logs into their account. I feel this will confuse and confound some of the less technical members of our group, so maybe not quite the holy grail I was after, but very close.

I won't ditch the server just yet, but time to evaluate something else: #XMPP. I've just installed #NetBSD (because, stuff LLM slop) on a VM, and I'll start working through getting ejabberd going.

XMPP isn't as far ahead on the many-to-many video chat that Matrix is (still in the design phase for XMPP, whereas Matrix Call has a working proof-of-concept based on LiveKit), but it is stable and well supported, so we'll give it a look.