Synapse

Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 6 years (2020–2025), in 6 threads.

People raised many different problems with Synapse, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 7 complaints

Self-hosting is painful; worker setup changes break instances and documentation is sparse and outdated2025-01-20
Open source Synapse is very slow because the Rust-optimised parts are only in the proprietary version2025-01-19
Administering the server requires a third-party app or hand-written curl requests2022-05-04
Too many config values to tweak; no guide to pick sane settings2022-04-10
Repeated installs are clunky; misconfigured Postgres and certbot/nginx setup breaks with no clear fix2022-04-10
Setup docs are hard to follow and don't explain what Synapse is2021-01-12
Self-hosting setup is very hard: SSL certs, TURN, and federation take hours to configure2020-05-07