this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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I always heard that rolling out an initial Matrix instance isn't terrible, especially with ansible and/or docker, but I also have heard that a lot of updates have breaking changes and that updating your server is less simple.
As someone who runs your own Matrix server, would you agree with this sentiment or disagree and why? I have considered rolling out my own many times but get discouraged by those who say keeping it updated is kind of a nightmare. For example, a private tracker I am a member of used to have a Matrix server and an IRC server, but they eventually dumped the Matrix server entirely to reduce complexity as well as the fact that fewer people used it.
I run my own matrix server, too. I've never had any issues with updates. Honestly, I just pull the new docker image without thinking twice about it. It is risky, of course, but I have daily automated backups, so I'm not too concerned. Personally, I felt like setting up a matrix server for the first time was the biggest pain in the butt. It's extremely convoluted with very poorly written documentation that is often outdated or incomplete. After I got through that, it was smooth-sailing from there. Setting up mautrix bridges one you got Synapse to work is actually really easy, though.
I don't even really plan to use any bridges, as I understand it those are for if you want to pass messages from other services through your matrix server. I would rather keep those separate personally, even though I understand certain benefits, including having all your messaging in one application instead of numerous.
When a bridge works like the discord and the Signal and WhatsApp ones it's amazing not to need to log in to those services anymore just to see if someone wrote something to you.
Sadly most of the bridges are either broken like the Facebook one or straight out don't work like she KakaoTalk and WeeChat ones because the services remove capabilities which before made it possible in a hacky way.
I run it in docker and an update has never caused issues. Been about 3 years.
Which docker container do you use, if you don't mind me asking. Also, how complicated would you rate the setup? I have a degree in network admin and run multiple Linux servers and docker containers with manually created docker network bridges so they can freely communicate with one another, to give an idea of my knowledge base. Honestly the only thing I haven't done before yet that makes me nervous is setting up a reverse proxy to expose the endpoint to the internet and connect it to my owned domain name.
I use the synapse container, I followed the docs on matrix.org.
As far as a revere proxy I use the SWAG container from linuxserver. My matrix instance isnt exposed to the internet or federated but it used to be. When it was exposed I was using fail2ban to ban exploit attempts but if I were to set it up again I'd probably use crowdsec instead. They are both built into SWAG.
I run it on Ubuntu and installed it with apt about 7 years ago and had zero problems, it updates itself when I run apt upgrade, it turns itself off for a couple of seconds and then it's back up.
I didn't even know they had it set up as an apt repository for Ubuntu. Very interesting.