I want something that works like Discord for my gaming group (~120 people) and is self-hostable with a single „docker-compose up -d“.

But I started looking regularly for alternatives, and we will get there :)

It’s not quite as simple as a single docker compose, but the Element Server Suite for hosting a matrix home server (synapse) was fairly simple to get working.

What was your secret to get it working? I’ve been trying to get it running for 2 weeks following the official guide. I’m able to create an admin user via the CLI, but when I try to go to any of the subdomains I’ve created, I either get a 404 or the TLS handshake fails to complete. The people behind ESS are very clear that they do not offer any support and I haven’t been able to find an answer to this problem anywhere.

Ok, so that sounds like either a DNS issue or a reverse proxy issue. Did you configure your domain/subdomains to point to the public IP address of where you’re setting things up? Are you using the reverse proxy in the guide or do you already have a reverse proxy and you’re adding ESS domains to it? Did you configure port forwarding on your router?

I have had issues with accessing my locally hosted services via domain name while on the same network. My router doesn’t like to route internal traffic back to its own WAN port. Can you access it from something on a different network (cellular data)?

Sorry for the delayed response, things have been wildly busy for me.

I did configure my domains as instructed, and they do resolve to the expected IP address. I don’t have an already existing reverse proxy, so I was just following along with what the guide was telling me to do. That said, this may be the issue, because I don’t recall seeing any specific set up for the included reverse proxy and I’ve been through that guide 3 times. I haven’t configured port forwarding on my router since I’m using a Hetzner VPS for this, but I did make sure to open up the required ports on the firewall.