So I manage a discord server related to autism of about 800 people and due to Discord’s recent issues, we have been looking at opening an alternate space on matrix that is bridged to our discord. I did try self hosting but I am admittedly not technically inclined and couldn’t get it working, so I have the space on a public home server. We have gotten things setup and ready, but there is one concern, which is moderation. I did manage to get a draupnir instance, but I have not found it to be an adequate automod. I am concerned about how moderation could work as we have a large number of rooms. I wanted to know if anyone who moderates a large matrix community can provide some insight on what to do for this.
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Best thing would be paying for hosting. That comes with an admin interface and the ability to add bots and bridges. With admin access you have all the power you need
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/hosting/ has recommended hosting solutions. I can recommend https://etke.cc/order/
Without admin access, any reports dont go to you but server admins of the public instance and if you’re on matrix.org instance, moderation can take a while. Hence the recommendation. With 800 people, you should be able to get enough donations to pay 40€/month on etke.cc or something else.
I don’t want to take donations from others and I also don’t really want to pay 40€ a month
Ekte has the Draupnir bot as a $3 add on. It does the job, I only Federated and set the server to public after having the bot. I am paying for the service until I can fully figure out the deployment and then do it on a small cloud provider not in the US. I have run into a few unexpected problems that would have downed a deployment if I was at the helm. I don’t think you can deploy on prem because it has a lot of edge requests for federation. I left it uncached for a week and had 300 000 requests. Remember with discord it is centralized and Discord is covering the cost of voice and video traffic, which it pays for by selling you as the product and Nitro. When you decentralize, everyone now has to handle the cost of traffic separately to build the network. The price of the fully managed server is less than the 4 Nitro subs we were using on the Discord server. I don’t think enough people remember using Vent, Mumble, and Teamspeak at the same time depending on which group of people your were with. Back then we had to pay fot a Teamspeak server, but TS is not Federated and has a lot of friction for new users, that is why Discord did so well.
I already mentioned I have draupnir. Maybe it worked well for you, but I’ve found it annoying and there’s still a lot it can’t do. Its also not all that user friendly. I was trying to see if someone had an alternative. Again, I’m not someone who is that tech saavy and I have had no luck at self hosting, and don’t want to get a provider. Also we are a pretty large server and are growing, so I really want to know how that can work on matrix. I’ve found most uses of matrix to be for small groups and not large communities, and haven’t found much for what to do as a large community.
