| I'm sorry to hear that you got overwhelmed and gave up on Matrix!
Below, I'll try to explain why it can overwhelming and how one might navigate things better. While the Ansible playbook's documentation is huge (which can be both good and bad), one does not necessarily need to read through everything to get started. The playbook's documentation tries to guide you through the required steps to get started and always tries to suggest "skipping ahead" and staying with the recommended defaults. It does mention additional services, but branching off into reading about esoteric additional features from the very beginning is not necessary. It's better to follow the steps and start with the basics. You can add additional services and tweak the existing ones later on at any time. That said: - just like a production-ready email system is complicated to deploy, so is Matrix (even with the Ansible playbook). Some learning and planning is necessary. Important decisions (with regard to domain names, etc.) need to be made upfront - the playbook's documentation may benefit from a new and dedicated "quick-start guide" which would not even mention most or any of the additional services. This could help people get started quicker, instead of making them give up due to analysis paralysis As for the latter, there are various articles (blog posts) online where people guide you through using the playbook (they act as a "quick start guide"). A downside to those is that some may be out of date and/or skip through steps which may turn out to be important later. The playbook's documentation is extensive, because it not only aims to get you running, but to also instill knowledge as to how things work so that you're more capable of managing the deployment later on. It's a bit like the Arch Linux Wiki in this regard - it gives you more to read (and walls of text can be scary), but is also there for you for when you need help. Disclaimer: I'm the author of the matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy) playbook |