Beginner’s Guide: How To Get Started With Element & Matrix

Beginner’s Guide: How To Get Started With Element & Matrix

By Eric the IT Guy

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Eric, thank you for this remarkable guide. I am a COMPLETE noob when it comes to Matrix / Element and have a question for you or anyone else in the awesome DLN community:

Can one EASILY go about creating a server like the example given for LinuxDelta? I’d love to have something similar set up for Linux For Everyone. But reading the documentation at matrix.org has left me even more confused…

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Great guide. Thank you.

A comment about the pricing:
The cheapest paid option, called Nickel, is $2 PER USER per month. 5 users are included, so that makes it $10 + tax per month. The prices are for annual billing, so it is $120 + tax up front.
The second cheapest, called Silver, has custom branding and at the same cost per user, but it includes 25 users, so the cost is $50 per month and again, it is with annual billing, so you are out $600 + tax.

Extra users are purchased in 5, 25 and 100 user bundles for the Nickel, Silver and Gold plans respectively and are also paid up front.

Users that have not been active for more than two days total or not been active for the last 30 days are not counted in your total active users.

The lead of Matrix did a pretty informative YouTube video about getting quickly set up. I was able to use this video and the install documentation on the github to get synapse up and running via Docker. The video doesn’t cover docker but it is a speed run of setting matrix element and jitsi on Debian.

Edit: I now realize that I just essentially posted “I watched this, didn’t do it that way, but did a completely different but related thing“ and I want to clarify that the YouTube video really really demystified the process in general and gave me a good idea of the system requirements needed to run a matrix synapse + element-web + jitsi instance. Spoiler Alert: Jitsi needs RAM.

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Hey Jason, thank you for the feedback! I’ve really been enjoying Matrix.

As for setting up your own server, I haven’t given it a try yet. I’ve heard different degrees of success from folks. I hope to set one up soon. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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Hi Jason!
A few things.

  1. It’s possible to set up your own server, but I’ve been researching it for a while and it seems far from intuitive. With the linuxdelta server, I believe Noah paid some Matrix pros to help him get it up and running. That said, the Linux community is the Linux community and there’s probably someone out there who would be willing to give you a hand setting it up :smile:
  2. You should totally have a L4E community on Matrix. You do not have to host your own server to do this. You could use any server (matrix.org, linuxdelta.com, whatever). Hosting a server is cool, and incredibly useful, but totally not a prerequisite to getting a community set up on Matrix.
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I literally just did it for the vanity username.

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