If you have your own VPS anyway, there is the Matrix Ansible Playbook which makes the setup with docker containers very easy. But I also get the sentiment that you don’t want to tinker around all the time and just want stuff to work.

Kudos to you for using Matrix in the first place, I hope you can bring a lot of your friends and family to switch over to it. So far this has been the biggest hurdle on my journey 😅

I saw you recommend Continuwuity on other posts as well. Was just wondering, what made you choose Continuwuity over Tuwunel?

I am asking because I used to host a Continuwuity Matrix Server until a year ago. Recently started to look into hosting a Matrix server once again and found that Tuwunel seems currently ahead of Continuwuity in regards to WebRTC (Element Call) implementation and the sliding sync thingy.

At least they have updated documentation when it comes to WebRTC and how to set it up.

You can actually change these ports if you run Snikket behind a reverse proxy according to their advanced configuration docs. But yeah, probably going with something else than Snikket as it doesn’t really suite into my current Podman/Traefik setup. At least not without a lot of tinkering which I don’t feel like at the moment 😅

No weird opinions, you do you and if Matrix suits your needs, great. In general I like the idea and concept behind Matrix, was a bit clunky to get it going initially but afterwards, with Continuiwity as backend server I have to say I ran quite smooth. I guess for a small homelab/self hosted setup with maybe a hand full of users, XMPP sounds easier to maintain. But I guess I’ll have to find out, probably going to deploy Snikket or Ejabberd for a test run.

Only heard great things about it

Can’t speak for the Synapse hosting, as back when I hosted one myself I directly started with Dendrite (was not really that feature rich) and switched to Continuiwity soon after. And I have to agree, ran like a charm on my VPS and didn’t use a ton of resources. Granted, I was the only user so can’t say how the usage would have increased with more users active.

Yeah that’s the thing with a lot of these platforms, it’s dead simple for most people to download the app and create the account. You already loose two thirds (if not more) of the people as soon as the sign up process gets a bit more complicated, even more if they have to manage and secure any kind of secret (encryption keys) themselves. Not that it would be so difficult to save this stuff in a password manager, but I guess that’s already where a lot of people still fall short… What a uphill battle that was (still is) with some of my friends and family to get them to use a password manager for a start.

Couldn’t agree more with the first two points, especially the second one when it comes to adaptability by my non-techy friends and especially the wife-approval-factor.

I only tried out Delta Chat like two years ago linking it to a secondary Gmail account. Don’t think this really fully utilized it to its full potential. What do you like most so far about Delta Chat?

Nice blog post you wrote there, I like how you go into some details about the problems you faced hosting Matrix.

Used some of the Mautrix bridges (WhatsApp & Signal) in an attempt to combine all my messaging apps on the phone into one single app. Worked reasonably well I have to say.

The Discord bridge I never tried, mostly because my friend group is not really using the instant messaging part of Discord. We more or less only use it for voice chat while gaming or just some shit talking. Thinking about it, for this a TeamSpeak or Mumble server would probably be enough to replace our Discord usage 😄

Yeah faced that issue a couple of weeks ago as well after updating Podman. It didn’t allow me to set container individual UID/GID mappings or UserNS when running in a pod, so I just took them out of the pod as I couldn’t be bothered and run them as separate containers in the same network. Works just as good.

You just have to make sure to move the PublishPort block from the pod quadlet to the gluetun container (for all the containers which route their traffic through gluetun, i.e. which have ‘Network=container: gluetun’ set). This should solve the problem and still allows you to use UserNS or UID/GID mappings on the containers. No disadvantages so far, you just lose the convenience of stopping/starting all the containers at once through the pod. But I’d rather take this ‘inconvenience’ than troubleshooting for days how to make it work with a pod again.

Nice, did the move from docker to podman a couple of months ago myself. Now running the arr stack, nextcloud, immich and some other services as quadlets. File permission due to podmans rootless nature usually was the culprit if something was not working properly.

I can share my quadlet systemd files I use for the arr stack. I deployed it as a pod:

[Unit]
Description=Arr-stack pod

[Pod]
PodName=arr-stack
# Jellyseerr Port Mapping
PublishPort=8055:5055
# Sonarr Port Mapping
PublishPort=8089:8989
# Radarr Port Mapping
PublishPort=8078:7878
# Prowlarr Port Mapping
PublishPort=8096:9696
# Flaresolverr Port Mapping
PublishPort=8091:8191
# qBittorrent Port Mapping
PublishPort=8080:8080
---
[Unit]
Description=Gluetun Container

[Container]
ContainerName=gluetun
EnvironmentFile=global.env
EnvironmentFile=gluetun.env
Environment=FIREWALL_INPUT_PORTS=8080
Image=docker.io/qmcgaw/gluetun:v3.40.0
Pod=arr-stack.pod
AutoUpdate=registry
PodmanArgs=--privileged
AddCapability=NET_ADMIN
AddDevice=/dev/net/tun:/dev/net/tun

Volume=%h/container_volumes/gluetun/conf:/gluetun:Z,U

Secret=openvpn_user,type=env,target=OPENVPN_USER
Secret=openvpn_password,type=env,target=OPENVPN_PASSWORD

[Service]
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
---
[Unit]
Description=qBittorrent Container
Requires=gluetun.service
After=gluetun.service

[Container]
ContainerName=qbittorrent
EnvironmentFile=global.env
Environment=WEBUI_PORT=8080
Image=lscr.io/linuxserver/qbittorrent:5.1.2
AutoUpdate=registry
UserNS=keep-id:uid=1000,gid=1000
Pod=arr-stack.pod
Network=container:gluetun

Volume=%h/container_volumes/qbittorrent/conf:/config:Z,U
Volume=%h/Downloads/completed:/downloads:z,U
Volume=%h/Downloads/incomplete:/incomplete:z,U
Volume=%h/Downloads/torrents:/torrents:z,U

[Service]
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
---
[Unit]
Description=Prowlarr Container
Requires=gluetun.service
After=gluetun.service

[Container]
ContainerName=prowlarr
EnvironmentFile=global.env
Image=lscr.io/linuxserver/prowlarr:2.0.5
AutoUpdate=registry
UserNS=keep-id:uid=1000,gid=1000
Pod=arr-stack.pod
Network=container:gluetun

HealthCmd=["curl","--fail","http://127.0.0.1:9696/prowlarr/ping"]
HealthInterval=30s
HealthRetries=10

Volume=%h/container_volumes/prowlarr/conf:/config:Z,U

[Service]
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
---
[Unit]
Description=Flaresolverr Container

[Container]
ContainerName=flaresolverr
EnvironmentFile=global.env
Image=ghcr.io/flaresolverr/flaresolverr:v3.4.0
AutoUpdate=registry
Pod=arr-stack.pod
Network=container:gluetun

[Service]
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
---
[Unit]
Description=Radarr Container

[Container]
ContainerName=radarr
EnvironmentFile=global.env
Image=lscr.io/linuxserver/radarr:5.27.5
AutoUpdate=registry
UserNS=keep-id:uid=1000,gid=1000
Pod=arr-stack.pod
Network=container:gluetun

HealthCmd=["curl","--fail","http://127.0.0.1:7878/radarr/ping"]
HealthInterval=30s
HealthRetries=10

# Disable SecurityLabels due to SMB share
SecurityLabelDisable=true
Volume=%h/container_volumes/radarr/conf:/config:Z,U
Volume=/mnt/movies:/movies
Volume=%h/Downloads/completed/radarr:/downloads:z,U

[Service]
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
---
[Unit]
Description=Sonarr Container

[Container]
ContainerName=sonarr
EnvironmentFile=global.env
Image=lscr.io/linuxserver/sonarr:4.0.15
AutoUpdate=registry
UserNS=keep-id:uid=1000,gid=1000
Pod=arr-stack.pod
Network=container:gluetun

HealthCmd=["curl","--fail","http://127.0.0.1:8989/sonarr/ping"]
HealthInterval=30s
HealthRetries=10

# Disable SecurityLabels due to SMB share
SecurityLabelDisable=true
Volume=%h/container_volumes/sonarr/conf:/config:Z,U
Volume=/mnt/tv:/tv
Volume=%h/Downloads/completed/sonarr:/downloads:z,U

[Service]
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
---
[Unit]
Description=Jellyseerr Container

[Container]
ContainerName=jellyseerr
EnvironmentFile=global.env
Image=docker.io/fallenbagel/jellyseerr:2.7.3
AutoUpdate=registry
Pod=arr-stack.pod
Network=container:gluetun

Volume=%h/container_volumes/jellyseerr/conf:/app/config:Z,U

[Service]
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

I run my podman containers in a VM running Alma Linux. Works pretty great so far.

Had the same issue when debugging systemctl errors, journalctl not being very helpful. At one point I just ran podman logs -f <container> in another terminal in a while loop just to catch the logs of the application. Not the most sophisticated approach, but it works 😄