I’ve been selfhosting Synapse on Docker Compose for… maybe 1.5 years now? I’m also running bridges. I’ve never had to do monthly maintenance. I have around 20 users (my friends) active daily, a few federated rooms. I have message retention on and it “just worked” for me (not sure why OP had to do extra config)

I only find two of the critiques to be true in my experience:

1. Onboarding can be confusing for non-technical users. I use SSO so no registration, but the average person doesn’t know what an encryption key is, and they probably don’t want to either.
2. Synapse is written in python and as such isn’t super kind to memory/cpu. I’m doing fine on my cheap Hetzner box though.

Overall synpase for me has been very much “set it and forget it”. I can’t remember when I last did server maintenance.

claude performs acceptably at repetitive tasks when I have an existing pattern for it to follow. “Replicate PR 123, but to add support for object Bar instead of Foo”. If I get some of this busy work in my queue I typically just have claude do it while I’m in a meeting.

I’d never let it do refactors or design work, but as a code generation tool that can use existing code as a template, it’s useful. I wouldn’t pay an arm and a leg for it, but burning $2 while I’m in a meeting to kill chore tasks is worth it to me.

I’m running a Matrix server with a FB Messenger bridge via mautrix-meta and that makes it a clear winner. Half my group chats have migrated entirely since I’ve set my close friends up with accounts in my server and they also use the bridge. The fact that people can slowly migrate chats without losing messages or groups is killer for adoption imo.