As a bit of a follow-up to my previous post on taking a look at Matrix services I decided to venture down this rabbit hole a little further.
I have been using an account on Mozilla's servers for a couple of months but still haven't really done much with it. A couple of nights ago, I had a brain burble and thought I'd get a free trial on a small server with Element.io (previously Modular.im... and Riot.im) - Seriously, they don't make this easy for non-tech users to keep up, do they? I know why they did it but holy moly.
Anyway, I selected their "Nickel" server offering which supports up to 5 active users for $10/month. The pricing seems a little much to me but is certainly the cheaper of the two as discussed in my previous post. Besides, spinning up another Linode with the hardware requirements for it not to run out of space in 30 seconds will probably be the $10 tier anyway. I also don't have to worry about all the other admin tasks that come with it. Still, by the end of the free trial I may still decide that's the best option. Or perhaps not even bother and stick with the Mozilla account.
Setup was mostly painless. I had some serious issues with setting the CNAME to point at the Element servers as I opted for them to host the "well-knowns". After many what the fuck is wrong with you moments I managed to get it working with an "@" instead of the details they provided for the config.
Logging in was also a bit of an issue earlier today but I think that was mostly down to impatience as when I got my other half to create an account, it worked with the homeserver address fine.
I still think there are some strange oddities happening as I've had lots of "No known server" errors when trying to join rooms but I seem to have been able to join a couple of the rooms I used to be in now. Maybe I'm still being impatient and need to wait longer for other servers to acknowledge it exists? I'm not 100% convinced... yet.
I'll run the free trial right to the end and see how I feel then. Maybe I'll try spinning it up on a Linode myself and attempt to learn a little more about how it works.
For now though, you can find me here: @gray:kapsule.one