I was scared off a couple years ago when I attempted to host it myself. I took a break from selfhosting, but now I’m back, and from what I learned in the past, I know now not to torture myself swimming upstream when there are far easier downstream currents to follow.

I’m looking at conduit but I’m currently writing up a doc to plan out the process, and understand it before I actually deploy anything. I don’t want to open ports, don’t need federation and don’t need encryption, since I’ll be using tailscale to host a private server to only members of my tailnet.

I’ll report back, either here or in the main community, because I don’t want to expose ports, rent a VPS or use ansible for a simple private server for less than 10 people.

Forget about synapse and the “official” method. Install Continuwuity a matrix server written in rust, much much more efficient than synapse.

I took some notes while installing it here https://wiki.gardiol.org/doku.php?id=matrix%3Aconduwuit

I didn’t use docker but directly installation is very easy, it’s a single executable.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

9 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

[Thread #85 for this comm, first seen 12th Feb 2026, 01:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Helm is what is used for real world software deployments. It has its problems but it’s better than Docker Compose.

If you’re proficient it’s 30minutes

Something like this for server.

generate config

docker run -it --rm \
    -v <your-data-path>:/data \
    -e SYNAPSE_SERVER_NAME=<your-public-address-subdomain> \
    -e SYNAPSE_REPORT_STATS=no \
    matrixdotorg/synapse:v1.136.0 generate

run

docker run -d \
  --restart=always \
  --name synapse \
  -e SYNAPSE_REPORT_STATS=no \
  -v <your-data-path>:/data \
  -p 8008:8008 matrixdotorg/synapse:v1.136.0

register user

docker exec -ti synapse register_new_matrix_user http://localhost:8008/ -c /data/homeserver.yaml -u <username> -p <password> --exists-ok

Proxy it using ex. openresty / nginx

location / {
        proxy_pass    http://127.0.0.1:8008/;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header    Upgrade         $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header    Connection      "upgrade";
        proxy_set_header    Host            $host;
        proxy_set_header    X-Real-IP       $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-for $remote_addr;
        proxy_connect_timeout 600;
        proxy_read_timeout 86400;
    }

For UI if you want element on your domain, download and unpack tar.gz from.
https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/releases

Point this location to your proxy server ex. openresty / nginx

location / {
        root /opt/element-v1.11.109;
        index index.html;
    }

Modify config.json inside /opt/element-v1.11.109 to point location to <your-public-address-subdomain>

By default it’s using sqlite if you want postgres or other database then modify homeserver.yaml to use postgres