We are proud to introduce Element Starter: a brand new offering designed to provide IT administrators with a free, self-hosted, and user-friendly on-ramp to the world of secure communications and digital sovereignty.

After trying to understand if Synapse was still the preferred community method for Matrix after the post on Element X/ESS, I thought I’d share this.

Element Starter is a game-changer, offering a free (as in beer) self-hosted version of Element Server Suite. It is a lightweight version of the officially supported Kubernetes-based components found in our paid packages (Business, Enterprise and Sovereign) - the very same stack used to power the biggest Matrix homeservers in the world; built by the team who created Matrix.

Element Starter is designed to allow anyone in the world (who doesn’t need to start with our powerful paid-for enterprise features) to adopt Element Server Suite for free. This option gives them all the real-time communication functionality they expect from a leading messaging and collaboration app with the added benefit of self-hosting to ensure data ownership and control, while building on a wrought-iron foundation which is futureproofed for commercial support and features on demand.

Really surprised I can’t located migration methods anywhere, though. And that all the Element X app repos are still labeled pre-release but the blog says they are production ready.

Edit: This does require sign in and terms of use agreements, so I’ll be sticking to my Synapse docker container for now.

  • seang96A
    4·
    3 months ago

    Starter doesn’t support OIDC so free synapse I go even though I’d like a matrix server with high availability.

      • seang96A
        3·
        3 months ago

        I looked into the github repo for the open source version and found the images used. It looks like it uses the open source synapse app, so it suppprts whatever the synapse server supports. Unfortunately the operator wouldn’t fully support the new matrix 2.0 sliding sync / OIDC auth currently and since its the same synapse server it doesn’t support high availability which partially ruins the point of k8s.

        That being said it does seem to have some support for workers, but it seems to be a WIP and that definitely could save some time setting up workers since it can get quite complex. They have a basis for making secific worker types where you simply specify the type and it would theoretically start the worker and have it properly work with your proxy.

      • seang96A
        1·
        3 months ago

        I wonder if they will open up the core version to support it. Guess we will see.