🎉 Today marks 4 years of etke.cc! 🎉

🎉 Today marks 4 years of etke.cc! 🎉

The etke.cc managed Matrix hosting service was launched on the 12th of February 2021 and has turned 4 years old today!

Below is an overview of improvements that have happened over the last year.

Component changes

In the past year, we have launched a smaller number of components compared to last year. Most of our effort was spent on improving existing components, keeping up with upstream bridge replacements and polishing our service.

These components can be installed on existing servers upon request through our contact page.

Matrix-related components

• ✨ Addition: ($3/mo) maubot - a plugin-based Matrix bot system offering a wide range of plugins
• 🚀 Replacement/Upgrade: (+$3/mo) baibot - a Large-Language-Model (LLM) bot developed by us as a replacement for our old ChatGPT bot offering. You can use it to communicate with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and various other LLM providers.
• 🔄 Replacement: the old mautrix-facebook bridge was superseded by the new mautrix-meta bridge for bridging to Messenger. See our docs here.
• 🔄 Replacement: the old mautrix-instagram bridge was superseded by the new mautrix-meta bridge for bridging to Instagram. See our docs here.
• 🔄 Replacement: mx-puppet-discord was removed, in favor of the better mautrix-discord bridge we’ve been offering already
• 🔄 Replacement: mx-puppet-slack was removed, in favor of the better mautrix-slack bridge we’ve been offering already
• 🔄 Replacement: appservice-webhooks was removed, in favor of the better Hookshot bridge we’ve been offering already
• 🔄 Replacement: wireguard+dnsmasq was removed, in favor of the better Firezone VPN solution we’ve been offering already
• 🗑️ Removal: The following components were removed: mx-puppet-steam, mx-puppet-groupme, dimension. We removed them because they were not maintained upstream. Unfortunately, there’s no alternative right now.

Non-Matrix-related components

• ✨ Addition: (+$1/mo) [previously-offered and making a comeback] the LanguageTool proofreading software, now with optional n-grams support
• ✨ Addition: (+$5/mo) [brand new] the Funkwhale decentralized audio hosting platform
• ✨ Addition: (+$5/mo) [brand new] the PeerTube decentralized video hosting platform
• ☁️ Upgrade: (free) S3 Object Storage support was added to GoToSocial to make local disk space less of a limiting factor when scaling up
• 🔄 Replacement: We’ve replaced the Redis implementation twice, first with KeyDB and then with Valkey (which established itself as the leading and more compatible Redis implementation). Redis is an internal dependency component and only enabled on servers that need it.

Other changes

• ✨ Addition: A new monitoring service was created to monitor the health of each server and alert customers when troubles occur.
• ✨ Addition: Our new demo service allows new and existing customers to test various components and features before ordering a Matrix server.
• ✨ Addition: A new hosted version of the synapse-admin software is now available at admin.etke.cc. We still install synapse-admin to to each customer’s server as well, but the hosted version is a more bleeding-edge alternative that contains yet-unreleased features.
• ✨ Addition: synapse-admin provides exclusive features to etke.cc customers, which connect synapse-admin with etke.cc’s monitoring system and scheduler bot.
• 🚀 Upgrade: HTTP/3 support was added an enabled by default to all Matrix and non-Matrix services
• 🚀 Upgrade: Our private Docker registry now supports caching and authentication via docker-registry-proxy
• 📈 Upgrade: Thanks to our new monitoring service, some customers (those packing too many services on a small VPS) became aware of high RAM utilization. As a result we’ve adjusted database tuning to lower RAM cap and made SWAP more aggressive.
• 📨 Upgrade: Overdue payments alerts are now delivered both to Matrix and email, ensuring important notifications are not missed.
• 📨 Upgrade: DKIM support was added to the mailing service (exim-relay) used by all components, to improve email deliverability when the Matrix server sends outgoing emails. Last year, we added DKIM support to the Postmoogle email bridge so this is a continuation of that effort.
• 🆘 Upgrade: We’ve migrated our customer support system from Matrix (powered by Honoroit and Postmoogle) to Freescout (self-hosted via our own mash-playbook). Using a dedicated customer support system has proven to be more manageable compared to dealing with chat threads in Matrix.
• 🆘 Upgrade: New orders are now followed by an Order Status page that simplifies the completion process. It contains instructions for next steps regarding DNS settings and other configuration requirements.
• 🆘 Upgrade: The scheduler bot now supports a new price command, which provides an overview of server costs with detailed breakdown by components
• 🧑 Upgrade: We have finally added an About page to our website. Thankfully, it took us less than 4 years to get to it.

Free-software work

We’ve continued our work on the free-software (AGPLv3) Ansible mega-playbook - mash-playbook, which has grown to include 110+ components.

As part of our work over the past year, we have also developed and released as free-software (AGPLv3) the following new tools:

• ✨ Brand New: baibot - a Large-Language-Model (LLM) bot that you can talk to via Matrix, based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT or other LLM providers. This new bot is available to etke.cc customers, as mentioned above.
• ✨ Brand New: Docker Registry Proxy - a caching and authentication proxy for Docker registries
• ✨ Brand New: Synapse User Auto Eraser - tool for automatically erasing users and their media using Synapse Admin API. This is used internally in our new demo service to keep the server small and clean. See the Other changes section for more details.
• 🔀 Fork: etkecc/synapse-admin - we forked original synapse-admin software (created by Awesome Technologies) to implement often requested Quality-Of-Life changes - see the highlights. We’ve made 37 releases already.

We’ve also done a lot more. Keep an eye on our GitHub for more.

Numbers!

• 🏗️ We’ve installed 700+ Matrix servers in total, out of which 250 new ones.
• 🔄 Pushed 391 updates and enhancements to the automation framework used as the service core (this does not count the number of updates to the components and upstream projects themselves).
• 📢 Posted 56 updates in the announcements room, so you’re always up-to-date with what we’re working on.

For those interested in previous etke.cc birthday posts:

• 3 years celebration post
• 2 years celebration post
• 1 year celebration post

Source