Firstly, I wish you the best of luck in your community’s journey away from Discord. This may be a good time to assess what your community needs from a new platform, since Discord targeted various use-cases that no single replacement platform can hope to replace in full. Instead, by identifying exactly what your group needs and doesn’t need, that will steer you in the right direction.

As for Element, bear in mind that their community and paid versions do not exactly target a hobbyist self-hosting clientele. Instead, Element is apparently geared more for enterprise on-premises deployment (like Slack, Atlassian JIRA, Asterisk PBX) and that’s probably why the community version is also based on Kubernetes. This doesn’t mean you can’t use it, but their assumptions about deployments are that you have an on-premises cloud.

Fortunately, there are other Matrix homeservers available, including one written in Rust that has both bare metal and Docker deployment instructions. Note that I’m not endorsing this implementation, but only know of it through this FOSDEM talk describing how they dealt with malicious actors.

As an aside, I have briefly considered Matrix before as a group communications platform, but was put off by their poor E2EE decisions, for both the main client implementation and in the protocol itself. Odd as it sounds, poor encryption is worse than no encryption, because of the false assurance it gives. If I did use Matrix, I would not enable E2EE because it doesn’t offer me many privacy guarantees, compared to say, Signal.

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

12 pages of detailed documentation

Home Gamer: Is this it?

https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/develop/contrib/docker/docker-compose.yml

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.

Element has no gif keyboard just so you’re aware. Huge dealbreaker.