Continuwuity
from JadedBlueEyes@programming.dev to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 05 Jun 10:54
https://programming.dev/post/51540625
from JadedBlueEyes@programming.dev to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 05 Jun 10:54
https://programming.dev/post/51540625
I got distracted from my work so I made some Continuwuity propaganda. Continuwuity is a lightweights Matrix chat server that you can self-host pretty easily. Give it a try :3
threaded - newest
This is the homeserver written in Rust, right?
A suggestion: wherever a QR code is included, the human-readable content should be included next to it. Not everyone has a QR code reader handy, or their reader has the bad habit of immediately opening links or apps. In this case, I see that it just goes to continuwuity.org and is benign, but others may be apprehensive at naked QR codes.
(there’s obviously an exception for QR codes that are intended to convey machine info, like TOTP codes)
Agreed that QR codes should be accompanied by text links for accessibility, because many times the scanning fails due to bad light, old camera or shaky hands.
I was very excited when I started seeing QR codes gaining popularity. That excitement was quickly shattered when everyone just started using them improperly and they just made everything more annoying 😮💨
What exactly is “improper use”?
Basically anytime it’s not printed
Putting simple things behind a qrwall. I once went to a presentation and they had that qr code to scan to get the certificate, and I went there without my phone, so I got no certificate (I needed it for academic bureaucracy). restaurants with qr-only menus also come to mind. Oh, I also saw once a school with the timetables mural with just qrs and nothing else written, so if new students didn’t have a phone AND mobile internet, they couldn’t find by themselves where and when their classes took place
Lots of people use Lemmy via mobile. How am I supposed to scan a QR code?
Print it out and scan it. Use a barcode reader. Use another mobile. Upload it to a barcode decoder website.
Or I could just scroll past it and not give them the time of day because they were too lazy to post a link, you know, the primary method for navigating the internet for decades now. Why the need to overly complicate things?
You could have done that, but here we are.
Point being, if you can’t be arsed to do the bare minimum and post a fucking link, why should anyone give your post a second look?
It is!
Yeah, I see your point, and I included the link in the alt text. On the actual design itself though, any URL I wrote in could be completely different from the QR so it seems slightly pointless - especially as it would just be writing Continuwuity a third time haha
Including the URL isn’t to act as a check on the contents of the QR code, but to act as an alternative for those who don’t want to scan it at all.
The alternative is to search the name right next to the code in this design
This is not a good idea: having to search means an implicit reliance on a search engine. Even with a trustworthy web search – and those are becoming fewer and fewer – why add this complication? The URL doesn’t even have to be large; it just has to be readable.
Even worse is when there’s an adversary: what would stop someone from buying getcontinuwuity.org but have it be pro-Big Tech propaganda, with tracking cookies galore, and then pay Google or Bing to put it at the top of the web search results?
Whereas in 2026, a URL is not confusing at all to include. People know what http:// or https:// mean. Even big brands might not own their own product name’s domain. This exact problem came up just six days ago: neowin.net/…/paintnet-can-finally-be-downloaded-f…
The whole point of marketing is to reduce the barriers for people to find something useful or valuable. Adding an accessibility barrier is antithetical to that objective.
Or just post the link.
I know you are in good faith (and I already run my continuwuity server!), but in ppractical terms you are suggesting to use Google, and I don’t want to. Expecially for something you could have included in text in the post.
edit: I am reminded of Richard Stallman spelling out full URLs during conferences, complete with subdirectories. It is silly, but it works.
I can see a lot of opinions & comments on the QR part and, with respect, I’d like to add that I’m reading this post on a device where I’d like to view the site on the same device, so a QR isn’t best for this platform.
I’d go a little further and say that QRs and really only useful for a mediim where you want the user to use a 2nd device (printed media, BSODs, etc)
Also putting the URL in the (for my reader) non-clickable alt-text doesn’t help either
Again, with respect, you’re making it harder for your audience to reach you, not easier.
I made an NFC/QR code card for my wifi details at home, and that also includes the details written in clear text on the card, since some devices simply don’t do QR (or NFC in my case).
Respectfully, this software could solve all my problems in life, and I would still struggle to ask my friends to “federate with my continuwuity server so we can chat”
Then call it Matrix. They don’t need to know and probably don’t care about the specific server software you’re using.
Respectfully, you have no idea how Matrix works and I know you don’t use it if you think you have to tell people what backend you use for them to connect to you.
Its just called a matrix server, you don’t need to tell anyone the specific kind.
You can always change the name on your instance. Agree that there is no reason to use the project name, especially in this case.
I’m trying so hard not to hate this post but you have given me so many reasons to
use of UwU in something I absolutely need to share with others
mismatched fonts
comic something font
no human readable data next to the QR code
mismatched gradient radii in the corners
Make it stop 😭
EDIT: For those who care, this comment falls into the category of “said in jest, meant in earnest”. I know it’s all on-brand and comedic, but my gut reactions are what they are 😂
UwU. The cuteness is a huge plus IMO.
The problem is “cuteness” is very much in the eye of the beholder for things like this, and I’m with neatchee here, it’s not cute, and it makes it basically unshareable, and hence unusable in a lot of contexts. I appreciate the effort that’s gone into the project, but the name and publicity massively detract from that.
Considering that it’s a fork of conduwuit, continuwuity is a pretty fitting name, UwU 😺
You don’t need to share any server technology names, just that it’s the Matrix protocol or “platform”, or even just “Element” if they are using that app. I don’t tell other matrix users they are on a Synapse server.
Only the host needs to know about the server app name, and is the only one who interacts with it directly.
Hear me out: dont share it then and go find another option
Ow weewy, giv it a west! :3
Everything there (aside from perhaps not printing the full URL under the QR code) is deliberate and a part of the ‘brand’. Roboto + Sour Gummy for the fonts, asymmetry, whimsy. If you don’t like it, I’m sure you can use Element’s Synapse and you’ll be able to talk to people using Continuwuity just fine. That’s kind of the point.
Also fonts.google.com/specimen/Sour+Gummy?preview.scri… is way better than comic sans, you can’t convince me otherwise
Haha this is right in the middle of the spectrum between Comic Sans and Simpsons.
Looks like the Oatmeal’s font
This actually looks wtf lol
I’m saving this
stop? 👉👈 🥺 why UwU? me do wrong?
It’s purely a backend, what’s under the hood is not really visible to matrix clients.
Edit: Though I wish this graphic communicated that more, just realized it doesn’t even say anything about [matrix].
I like it. It’s nostalgic, in a 90s sort of way 😂
The project is the “official community continuation of the conduwuit homeserver”. Conduwuit was a popular matrix backend until the project was archived.
Although interestingly, conduwuit says the official continuation is Tuwunel. interesting
I’ve been using Tuwunnel since Conduwuit ceased developpment and I haven’t been able to find a reason to switch to Continuwuity yet.
Maybe this one should be named altuwunative.
Now this, I like!
Github, not so much
That is slightly misleading, they are/were sponsored by epost.ch / Swiss Post AG, which is a limited company.
Could you explain to us why you would recommend your project over tuwunel.
I avoid getting involved in these discussions, but previously on lemmy
Okay, I don’t know the history. It is unfortunate to not have project differences spelled out, because the truth is most of us know nothing about these things. Sounds like a no, but would it be possible for the projects to collaborate?
Considering the most recent is their lead developer getting banned from all Matrix Foundation rooms for CoC violations, the answer there is still no.
I find it hilarious that a government is sponsoring something with “UwU” in the name.
the only valid complain is “no human readable data next to the QR code”
Eh, the gradients hold some weight too for me, lol
For me it is the comic sans looking font
Those who would be off put by the UwU are not those I wish to talk to :3
Is there any reason to use Continuwuity over Tuwunnel?
At first I uwunderstood your comment as a joke, but apparently Tuwunel does in fact exist and it’s a continuation of Conduwuit.
*continuwuation
Yeah, I currently use Tuwunnel for my own matrix homeserver. It’s been really reliable so far.
Love and use this!
Solid, fast, amazing experience… A breeze to setup as well… Quite another thing than Synapse.
Well thanks for at least explaining what it is, but isn’t Matrix already self hostable? Anyway what’s wrong with IRC?
It's based on conduit, which itself is really a lot better for self-hosting than synapse or dendrite.
I ran conduit on an atom d2550 alongside other services and it basically idled. Running synapse or dendrite on the same machine made the whole machine max out permanently.
Irc is fine, but not federated...
Matrix is a protocol, not a software. Continuwuity is one of the few servers for this protocol.
Why do useful FOSS things always have the worst names that make it hard to spread.
Well, it startend with conduit. That was a respectable name. The development slowed down and someone wasnt happy abput not getting pr merged. Then it got forked to conduwuit.
Speed picked back up. There was later a massive meltdown for some reason. To successors emerged continuwuity and tuwunel.
There's almost always a backstory for why the makers choose the name they did, but that doesn't change the harmful result. A bad name seriously limits how much the software will ever get adopted. Heck, if there was a FOSS project i cared about enough then i would fork it and keep everything the same except give it a more palatable name.
If the fucking name of a project is the reason you won’t use it, then by all means, don’t. We’re not missing you.
Myopic take. Generally projects are healthier when they have a larger userbase
Then use it?
I'm not taking about me personally using it or not using it
Some users are not worth having.
When they have good names they get stolen.
Try took up about gemini protocol.
Lots of folks also like the unmarketable names, because you know that it’s not a corporate project. You’re hearing about it, because it’s actually good, and not just because some startup got VC money to do marketing.
Heck, the reverse is true as well. This project is better specifically because it has that name. You just know some transfemmes are tirelessly hacking away at it, because they enjoy the silly name.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.
[Thread #2 for this comm, first seen 5th Jun 2026, 20:00] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
qr codes are cringe
it’s all about datamatrix
Voilà
<img alt="" src="https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/53d4b558-6d90-4f53-abaf-5c0e6b595155.png">
truer ones use aztec
This really is a bizarre thread, but anyways, thank you for sharing.
I thought this was an ad, then I remembered that I was on lemmy, and I got sad because this is an ad
Respectfully this is a dumb fucking name
Myeah but it’s just a server - the clients just use Matrix.
It’s a spiritual successor to conduwuit, the name checks out imo.
Feel free to use Synapse, og conduit or whatever floats your boat.
I love it
Your users won’t ever see the name.
somebody: makes anything
lemmy: we hate this
I love how the culture of the fediverse is consistent. it hates everything, everywhere, all at once, and all of the time.
I tried to get my friends off of reddit on it and that’s what they always commented about, so they’ll never join.
I use the continuwuity server. Thank you to the devs for all of the hard work!
I hate you
I love that you hate him
you love them, really? how wonderful, I love you even harder
And I berate you!
Do they have MAS support yet? I kinda need my single signon :p
Support for delegation to an external IDP (without MAS) is a work-in-progress
and what about QR code login? I think MAS is required for that
I don’t understand why people need SSO.
Every place I’ve every worked that had SSO had an outage, and then nobody could log in to anything.
SSO moar leik single point of failure amirite?
yeah same, I don’t understand why people need DNS. Every place I’ve ever worked at that used DNS had an outage, and nobody could get into anything
We really want to use Matrix so bad, but none of them have every feature we need to replace discord atm.
It’s not really designed to be a Discord replacement. It’s a messaging app/protocol that can do voice/video calls. Discord is a passive state voice / video / text channel app that was designed to create spaces for different topics. Matrix has added a similar hierarchical feature as an option, but its not the same and I don’t think it was meant to be.
We mean, overall we need something to text (plus send files), call, video/screen share and bonus for emojis, stickers and gifs. We get that discord and matrix isn’t really the same thing but the end result and use case is :/ So it would be a replacement for us
Doesn’t Matrix do everything you just listed?
Not the screen share which is pretty important to us. Can’t get it to work 90% of the time.
You should file an issue.
Where we had the issues, we did report them at the time. It was a while ago, so can’t remember which ones that we tried had issues. Have it in our plans to try a few again soon next time we get free time
pretty much Matrix’s entire point
also implemented in pretty much every server and client; I think even Element can send files
look into e.g. #matrixrtc:continuwuity.org — sable requires a setting to show the call button in non-DM rooms
unfortunately this is the only thing I’m not confident is supported
should be available with any im.ponies-compatible client such as sable
Screen share works, although some browsers don’t capture audio
Yeah the video/screen share it’s important to us as we like to watch stuff with friends and need it to show clients of art work during calls. It’s like the 1 thing rn that’s stopping us
Ive been keeping an eye on Movim for a discord alternative, I think spaces got added recently.
Haven’t heard of this one! Will look more into this
Bingpot! Features trump objections, which is how any industry knows it doesn’t really have to listen to users all that much. Deep down, addicts really don’t care if their heroin is ethically sourced from sustainably managed small-lot producers.
Pretty sure those are basic features of a community messaging/vc platform. Can survive perfectly fine and happily with less features if it meant that it was open source or we could host it ourselves.
It’s not matrix-based, but: Haven. It’s what I setup the… second? third? time discord had burned their users. The only thing missing for me is Xbox support, as several of my social circle are console gamers. But for pc users, it’s got everything I need.
github.com/ancsemi/Haven
Will look into this, going to have our own server eventually so this would help a lot! ^^
I don’t mind the name. It’s pride month so I figure the community would turn the silly up a notch.
Im not a tech person but, I’m gonna try it out. Thanks OP.
I’m planning on trying to self-host it on OpenBSD ngl. I do wonder. Does continuwuity support multiple independent domains on a single instance like Ejabberd does?
We have a few BSD users! And no, it doesn’t.
Ah well, good to know!
be warned that continuwuity phones home by default to fetch its news and feed it to the admin, you may want to turn that off before booting first time
That sort of telemetry should be opt in, not opt out
It’s not telemetry.
while i don’t want to throw shade on the developers’ intentions, nor have any real proof of what data is being kept, a fetch request bears by minimum the source ip (which can be geolocated) and the fact that the homeserver exists and runs continuwuity.
i’d suggest a matrix channel as alternative, so hosters can opt-in by joining. plus, by leveraging the matrix protocol, such announcements become federated push notifications, meaning they could come from any homeserver (limiting ip logging) and don’t imply the continued existence of such deployment, or the software which is being run
even converting such mechanism to an opt-out “auto-join announcements channel” would be more privacy respecting
.
BREAKING - Release 0.1 of DON’T is now available - DON’T does absolutely nothing when you start it, except to present an enormous Consent List of everything it can do if you let it. Outraged digital freedom advocates are criticizing what they call excessive download times, sluggish support, and that the app takes up memory space without doing anything.
Not telemetry? Continuwuity just uses it to post release announcements to the admin room; I think there’s a way to disable it if you prefer.
What is that and why is it bad?
How do you do that?
I assume they’re referring to the announcement check, configurable via an option in your config file. It’s what we use to make sure everyone knows about important things like security updates.
Edit: Lemmy keeps breaking the link, it’s under allow_announcements_check
Well if that is your only negative point, it must be pretty good.
it absolutely is! honestly all matrix homeservers are impressive, the protocol is not for the faint of heart
Thst branding reminds me of the extensive complaints of Anubis beeing too weaboo for production applications lol.
What do weaboos have to do with Egyptian gods?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis_(software)
Talking about this as if people couldn’t replace the images here with whatever they wanted github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/tree/main/web/…/img
Damn weaboos really do be making everything an anime girl
Does it work for non-furries(fleshies?)?
I was under the impression that they preferred to be referred to as ‘skinnies’. We are all flesh, after all… well except protogen…
Does it have easy gif embedding like discord? I tried another chat app and it felt so stripped down without gifs or emojis
Depends on the client you use. Sable has loads of features like that.
.
Matrix’s algorithm is fundamentally broken. I guess it works if you only talk to people you know won’t abuse it, but otherwise it’s easy to split rooms or even re-write their history if you want to…
Damn, I knew it had problems with room stability, but that’s kinda completely ridiculous.
Because it’s not true, and hasn’t been true since 2018 at the latest.
It’s not as dramatic as GP makes it, but Matrix had been at the prototyping stage and at figuring out its core protocol and state resolution algorithm for more than a decade now, it’s pretty ridiculous in itself.
So you’re saying all these concerns have been alleviated ?
benharri.org/why-not-matrix/
Posting a 3 coming on 4 year old post, of course it’s not going to be accurate any more. And that’s for the points that aren’t just fear mongering in the first place.
Here is a link if you want to know more :
benharri.org/why-not-matrix/
I kind of lost interest when they found out that in a distributed system you can’t delete things
ITT: people complaining about the name. Nothing else negative.
Which to me sounds like it must be a damn good software.
how am I supposed to talk my family into using this over something normal?
Unless I’m mistaken, this is just a matrix server. If you were using Dendrite, you wouldn’t say “hey let’s try dendrite,” you would say “let’s try Matrix, here’s my server.”
At least, that’s how I would say it. Server software choice is details they would not care about and would likely cause confuwusion.
How does this compare to tuwunel?
Seems tuwunel is dev of previous project and this is community fork.
How are the moderation tools? I see matrix having a big troll problem, enough to put me off of it.
Moderation tools are powerful but desperate to the server. Asgard.chat offers some hosted options, but meowlnir, Draupnir and policyserv are the usual tools.
I’m sure you meant something else, but I can’t deduce what. Dedicated? Separate?
How do I actually create an account? I’ve tried deploying a test server but when I try to create an account with Element X it just says the server needs to be upgraded to support matrix authentication service and account creation. FluffyChat doesn’t let me create an account either, it just shows me a login page.
As I’m just testing the federation port isn’t actually accessible, would that break account creation or do you have to use the console to create accounts? I’ve never used matrix before
Element X doesn’t support the traditional way of making accounts, try use cinny.in to make an account in the browser and then log in with element X. Fluffychat should also present a “create a new account” button above the login button. Make sure to follow instructions in the console for registering the first account.
The federation port not being accessible won’t break local functionality but will break federation, so you won’t be able to talk with other people. Either change the configured port in the well-known file or forward the port via your reverse proxy.
I’d suggest joining the support room via an alt account, you’ll get faster responses.
Thanks that worked!