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by walrus01 1961 days ago
Not necessarily, I run a non-federated synapse (matrix protocol) server for intranet type use. It's in an environment where it has no connection to the wider internet at all.

The default matrix.org servers are federated.

In terms of what the default Element install presents to the user upon launch in its GUI, I think it does offer the 'official' matrix.org servers as a place to create an account and sign in, start browsing 'rooms'.

1 comments

Your users still benefit from less centralization. The main matrix.org instance might ban them for whatever reason, but their access to your internal server is not touched. It's different if all of you used Signal or Discord and their account got banned e.g. for using an alternative client.
Signal is open source you can run your own non-federated signal server. You can use a custom signal client against the federated network too.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vq4k/thousands-of-users-un...

Signal Server has not seen updates for over 9 months. Moxie openly states that is not part of Signal's core values to support federation in the network.

IOW, even though they say they don't want to control your conversation, they do want you in their hands.

But. The point is still that you can run your own non-federated signal server or connect your own client to their federated network.
An outdated version of the server whose development team has no incentive whatsoever of supporting for your use case.

Can you run it? Sure. Should you?

Why does any source code exist then? What is the point of GitHub with codebases that are 7+ years old? Would mass adoption of the outdated server force updates or god forbid a fork of the code base?

Please excuse me for being direct, I do not accept your defeatist attitude on this one. You won’t have stickers, such a shame, but you would have the ability to create your own signal service

Moxie is not friendly towards such third party clients that connect to the main network. Also, I only used it as an example. There might be other reasons for a ban. The point is that you don't depend on them.