this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
22 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

52332 readers
636 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hi there! Recently I've been setting up a self-hosted instance of matrix, using Synapse in docker, but I've been struggling to get voice chat working, could anyone give me some pointers? It looks like I need something called a TURN server, but I can't find any good instructions to set this up, or if this is actually what I need to enable voice chat.

Thank you so much to any responses!

Edit: this is what my compose file looks like (with some information ommitted)

services:  
  synapse:  
    image: ghcr.io/element-hq/synapse:latest  
    restart: unless-stopped  
    environment:  
      - SYNAPSE_CONFIG_PATH=/data/homeserver.yaml  
    volumes:  
      - ./files:/data  
    depends_on:  
      - db  
    ports:  
      - 8008:8008/tcp  
    networks:  
      - npm_proxy  
  db:  
    image: docker.io/postgres:15-alpine  
    environment:  
      - POSTGRES_USER=**Ommitted**  
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=**Ommitted**  
      - POSTGRES_INITDB_ARGS=--encoding=UTF-8 --lc-collate=C --lc-ctype=C  
    volumes:  
      - ./schemas:/var/lib/postgresql/data  
    restart: unless-stopped  
networks:  
  npm_proxy:  
    external: true  

Update: someone on windows is able to call me, but on their phone, it says MISSING_MATRIX_RTC_FOCUS. I'm going to look into this

top 9 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] JadedBlueEyes@programming.dev 2 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

All of the other answers mentioning coturn here are wrong - your friend is trying to call you using element call, which needs an instance of a livekit and a JWT micro service to grant permissions to use the livekit instance. You can use a livekit cloud account, but you do need to host the JWT service. I would suggest looking up Element's documentation

[–] domoel@feddit.org 2 points 20 hours ago
[–] stratself@lemdro.id 1 points 21 hours ago

You'll need a TURN server to relay calls and provide signalling capabilities, which is needed most of the time. Here's Synapse docs on it, and I'll probably use coturn:

https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/turn-howto.html


There's also this new technology called Element Call, which uses a diffent tool called LiveKit. You should check it out too

https://github.com/element-hq/element-call/blob/livekit/README.md

[–] yaroto98@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Did you create your own docker container, or did you use the official one?

I have the official one up and running, voice and video chat work out of the box.

I just updated the post with my compose.yaml file in case that's helpful

[–] guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I've tried using the docker container at ghcr.io/element-hq/synapse and https://hub.docker.com/r/matrixdotorg/synapse, whenever someone tries to call another, it just stays on "connecting" forever

[–] Eirikr70@jlai.lu 2 points 1 day ago
[–] olorin99@kbin.earth 1 points 1 day ago

I'd recommend using https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy. It makes managing synapse and related services pretty easy.

[–] tekato@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

You have a higher chance of solving this issue if you ask in #webrtc:matrix.org