Yes, I do federate (I also use it for IRC and you need federation to access the liberachat IRC-Matrix bridge). Besides that I have just one other active user.
I use synapse as the server and Element as the client. I had tried out a bunch of other clients a few months ago, but found Element to be the most mature.
My experience has been pretty great overall. There were a few early issues (relating largely to a slightly weird network setup) but otherwise it works very well once setup.
Recently when I was trying to setup Mastodon, I realized how much more mature the setup process for synapse was. The setup needed for networking is better documented and they have a tool for testing if federation is working (and if not, attempting to provide an explanation why). This made it relatively easy to set things up correctly for my network compared to Mastodon, where I finally just gave up and setup a digitalocean droplet instead.
Functionality wise, everything works pretty well, E2EE requires a bit of preplanning to maintain across devices (ie. Keeping a backup of the keys or having the key store setup) but that's reasonable. The spaces feature needs a bit of UI polish but otherwise provides a similar hierarchical channel grouping system as Discord and Slack.
I can't really think of any other particular criticisms I have of it except that to administrate a server we still seem to have to lean on a third party application, synapse-admin (or hand write curl requests), it would be nice for it to just be incorporated into the client or into the server. I haven't had to use it much due to not having many users, but I imagine it's pretty relevant for servers with more users.
I've tried running Synapse (and was partially successful) a little while ago but didn't try to federate as I never took the basic hosting of it anywhere.
I will try again when I have my new home infra set up.
I use synapse as the server and Element as the client. I had tried out a bunch of other clients a few months ago, but found Element to be the most mature.
My experience has been pretty great overall. There were a few early issues (relating largely to a slightly weird network setup) but otherwise it works very well once setup.
Recently when I was trying to setup Mastodon, I realized how much more mature the setup process for synapse was. The setup needed for networking is better documented and they have a tool for testing if federation is working (and if not, attempting to provide an explanation why). This made it relatively easy to set things up correctly for my network compared to Mastodon, where I finally just gave up and setup a digitalocean droplet instead.
Functionality wise, everything works pretty well, E2EE requires a bit of preplanning to maintain across devices (ie. Keeping a backup of the keys or having the key store setup) but that's reasonable. The spaces feature needs a bit of UI polish but otherwise provides a similar hierarchical channel grouping system as Discord and Slack.
I can't really think of any other particular criticisms I have of it except that to administrate a server we still seem to have to lean on a third party application, synapse-admin (or hand write curl requests), it would be nice for it to just be incorporated into the client or into the server. I haven't had to use it much due to not having many users, but I imagine it's pretty relevant for servers with more users.