@IceWolf I need to try Matrix sometime. I still can't tell if it's trying to be an IM system or what.

@faoluin I...think it's supposed to be like Discord? Ish? With a smidgen of IRC (channels are top-level objects, not in quote "servers").

@Sneptococcus Uuuuugh.

@Sneptococcus @faoluin I hope someone replied "Why aren't you on Discord...?"

@Feuerfuchs @faoluin I did, but not until after they left. Then I got a reminder that we're supposed to be nice.

@Sneptococcus @Feuerfuchs I'm told that being nice is overrated.

@lightweight I know right? Discord and Facebook can change at any time, and businesses might have to leave those platforms if those changes are undesirable. Email is an actual standard, will be around probably forever, and doesn't change nearly as much nor at the behest of one corporation (as much as Google might have you believe otherwise).

@faoluin Yup. And regarding email, yes, it's a decentralised standard (despite Microsoft and Google's efforts to tie it up) - I run my own mail servers using Mailcow - despite the goofy name, works great, and is 100% open source. This is what I run: https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized

@lightweight @faoluin And mailcow is also way easier than people could make you think with posts like "Mail is hard", "Don't host your own mail" etc. right? I use mailcow too and always wonder why not more people are selfhosting their mails 😅

@jlelse @faoluin Yup - I'm about to do my 3rd implementation (for the NZOSS) - I run one for myself/friends and one for the OER Foundation... Pretty hard to fault.

@lightweight @faoluin Nice 👍 Btw what are you using as host OS? I currently use Ubuntu but would like to switch to RancherOS, which I use on my normal webserver.

@jlelse @faoluin just to keep things consistent, using Ubuntu 18.04 for all my hosting, using the Docker implementation (I use it for all my many app deployments) to minimise the dependencies and easy moving them around...

@lightweight @faoluin You run mailcow-dockerized inside Docker (using dind?)? 🤔 That sound's like an interesting idea 😅

@jlelse @faoluin I use the docker distro that I linked to :) - has a very tidy installer even. I've done a bit of tweaking since then, but it's very quick to get set-up and running...

@jlelse @faoluin will look into it further... there're a few things I tend to do on the host, like running backups, and usually a mysql database (to simplify backups - I can backup all my apps with one process rather than having to replicate it across a lot of MySQL-requiring apps, for instance. I use MariaDB fwiw :) )...

@lightweight @faoluin Docker distro? You mean mailcow-dockerized or do I missunderstand something? 🙈

@jlelse @faoluin yes, that one.

@jlelse @faoluin is RancherOS' main appeal a smaller size/resource use? None of my infrastructure seems particularly resource constrained, so I haven't been too worried...

@lightweight @faoluin RancherOS is like everything Docker. Perfect if you just use Docker for deploying things.

@jlelse @lightweight I've been toying with the idea of hosting my own mail, specifically putting it together from scratch - as one article I read pointed out, if something breaks you'll have to dig into it anyway, and you learn a lot more doing so.

The biggest problems I've heard about are A) filtering incoming spam, B) sunglasses, and C) convincing the big players that *you* aren't spam.

@faoluin @jlelse yup, it's tough. I am moving from a home-made collection of #FOSS tools (been running them for the past 3 or 4 years) to MailCow... I did what you're doing, and it was kinda cool, and it worked, but it took me a week, full time, to get it going properly... and I still had a few issues with being spam-binned. You can learn lots from Mailcow, too, but also have a really solid mail platform at the same time...

@faoluin @jlelse the main reason I tried Mailcow was that I knew at some point I'd have to re-implement my mail solution on a newer server... and looking at the thousands of lines of diffs (default app config -> my working config) I realised that I didn't have the patience to do it... so I looked around, checked mail-in-a-box and then settled on MailCow with its Dockerized version... because I prefer Docker if possible.

@grin Matrix strikes me as more of an IM service? Regardless, if I had to replace email with Matrix or Discord I'd certainly pick the former. FOSS forever!

@faoluin matrix is a funky thing: it is "an eventually-consistent federated hierarchical json database", with "integral support for end-to-end-encryption", though not preventing metadata leaks. Can be used as chat, forum, blog, webpage, im, but technically it is any kind of message passing or broadcast.
But not suited to replace email, as I have indicated. Neither does facebook, or even FOSS alternatives of it.