The Matrix move

It moved

My Matrix homeserver no longer lives on my Raspberry Pi. I originally hosted it locally simply because I could. I always knew that a VPS was the way to go.

Now Tuwunel itself runs on the VPS alongside LiveKit. Latency is better because my home network has limited upload bandwidth.

So, is the Raspberry Pi lonely?

As a matter of fact, it now has a purpose: running Home Assistant. I had been planning to set it up for a while and did it a few weeks ago.

I bought some Matter light bulbs, and now they are controlled by Home Assistant. An absolutely great thing — praise the open source.

Freenet

Recently I found out about Freenet. It looks like it's a real decentralized alternative to the traditional web. Matrix is decentralized too, but in a different way.

Freenet is something you can try at the moment, but not everything is ready. One of their apps uses Dioxus for its frontend, which is interesting, of course.

The general idea behind Freenet is a fully peer-to-peer network. There is nothing else to add because it just works like that, and it's great.

I will keep an eye on it.

So is Matrix bad?

I don't think so. It still offers decentralized communication, but there are some people who run homeservers and who probably have some centralized power.

Anyone can create a Matrix server and run it on their own hardware if they are concerned about privacy. It's good to have an island of freedom in this age of the internet.

Overall, Matrix no longer feels particularly raw; it is ready to use, and it will become better and more popular. Freenet could become a genuinely different alternative, and it's really worthy of attention.