If you’ve been selfhosting conduit or conduwuit, you probabl are aware that the conduwuit project was discontinued a couple months back.
I’ve been holding out on updating my matrix homeserver until it becomes clear which fork(s) will survive long term.
I feel like I can’t put off updating for much longer now, plus the tuwunel nixpkg and -module were merged yesterday, so now the two most promising forks are both options for me.
Still, I’m unsure what route to take. Here’s my thoughts:
- not going through another round of this in a couple of months from now would be great, so stability and long-term maintenance promises would be great
- I assume incompatibility between the forks, if not now then very soon; this is a “pick an option, then stick with it and pray” situation
tuwunelapparently has a full-time paid dev working on it now, which is great; at the same time, that means features will follow the priorities of the (as of now unknown) sponsor of the project- it is, however, the officially endorsed successor
- it also seems like few other people are actively involved, putting in question development practices, reviews, and what happens should the lead dev throw in the towel
- lastly, while there’s been a lot of apparently rapid progress (with releases 1.0.0, 1.1.0, and 1.2.0 at quite a fast pace), the repo itself seems… empty? Few issues, few PRs, commentlessly-deleted issues
- on the other hand,
continuwuityseems more active by commit/contributors count, but is seemingly 100% volunteer work - they do seem to backport
tuwunelchanges and features, which is great! - they are not officially endorsed
In short: I fucking hate community drama. What fork did you go with? Is there anything else to consider? I just want an up-to-date matrix homeserver, and not to have to tell my users “sorry, starting from scratch because we picked the wrong fork…”
I don’t really like synapse, because it performs really bad. But at least it has a stable development. So that’s what I use.
But more and more I’m questioning if matrix is really the federated messaging platform we want. A lot of the drama and development issues of any synapse alternative seem to have their roots in how hard and unsatisfactory is trying to follow the matrix protocol which is subdued to synapse development in a weird form, apparently.
I still use it. But I’m too tired of the drama, and wondering if there’s even a chance for a long term synapse alternative, or if matrix devs are actually doing something that prevents that for ever happening.
Yes, completely agree. It seems that the matrix foundation could easily take a different path to allow the community to flourish and third-party servers to have a much easier time. Since I’m not federated, I wouldn’t even mind if whatever fork I’ll end up on eventually says “fuck this, we’re not following synapse specs any more”.
But yeah, I am sure selling premium accounts on matrix.org is what will save the matrix ecosystem… 🤦🏼♀️