Synapse

Judgement

What it is

Complete system

What it does

The reference Matrix homeserver for running your own federated chat, maintained by Element.

Adopt it when

You want to run your own Matrix server for a team or community that can federate with others.

Watch out

Resource-hungry for large rooms, and Element moved it to AGPL with a commercial licence option.

Ready for

Production-ready

Runs as

Self-hosted server

Built with

Python, Twisted, Rust and PostgreSQL

How established

Established: started 2 years ago, latest release v1.164.2.

What the license allows

Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.

Judged on 2026-11-03 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: Synapse → CPython → GCC → LLVM project → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

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