Lightweight, Decentralized Chat.

Telodendria is an extremely powerful, yet lightweight and portable chat server designed to be easy to install and configure. Powered by the Matrix protocol, Telodendria empowers everyone to run their own chat server on ordinary hardware, including old and embedded devices. Whether you want a simple chat server just for you and your friends and family, or want to talk to users on other Matrix homeservers but don't want to go through all the hastle of hosting a complicated, high-maintenance homeserver or joining an existing homeserver for privacy or other reasons, then Telodendria might be for you.

What is Matrix?

Matrix is an open standard for interoperable, decentralized, secure, and real-time communication over the internet.

Matrix can be thought of as the successor to email, but it works very similar to iMessage, Discord, or direct messaging on most social media networks. The primary difference between Matrix and these other services, however, is that Matrix doesn't depend on one central authority, and is designed in such a way to respect your privacy. Matrix has proven itself over the last few years to be a reliable communication tool, and has only gotten more user-friendly over the course of its development. Matrix is capable enough that it can—and should—totally replace any other means of digital communication, and it offers a much higher degree of security, simplicity, and functionality.

Strictly speaking, Matrix itself is just the protocol by which clients and servers communicate. In order to use Matrix, we need implementations of both clients and servers. Telodendria is a server implementation of the Matrix protocol.

Why Telodendria?

• Lightweight: Written in the C programming language, Telodendria is automatically lighter and faster than other self-hosted chat servers. It has very few external dependencies and is as self-contained as possible.
• Fully-Featured: Most lightweight chat solutions compromise on features. Telodendria is built on the fully-featured Matrix protocol, which provides a chat experience that most normal users are familiar with.
• Portable: You can run Telodendria on just about everything, including more traditional options like a personal home server or VPS, but also more obscure platforms like Raspberry Pis or retro computers. Telodendria can run on a broad number of operating systems, which means that no matter which platform and OS you prefer, there is a good chance you can add Telodendria without much difficulty. It is also extremely easy to migrate a Telodendria instance between platforms; just copy the data directory to a new device.
• Simple: Telodendria is designed to be a simple, no-frills chat server. It is easy to install, easy to configure, and easy to maintain.
• Stable: Other Matrix homeservers develop at the pace of the Matrix specification itself, which is to say quite rapidly. Changes are always being made, and a version shipped 6 months ago is already incredibly outdated. Telodendria, on the other hand, aims to be stable. It should just work for long periods of time between upgrades, and you should never feel like Telodendria is going to change significantly between upgrades.
• Well-Documented: Telodendria places as much emphasis on documentation as on code, which means you can be sure that the documentation will always remain up-to-date, accurate, and most importantly, reasonably exhaustive.

Read Technical Rationale →

Get Started

Check out the Documentation to get started with Telodendria.

Status

Telodendria is in the very early stages of development. As such, it may not yet deliver on all of its promises. Currently, Telodendria is not ready for end-users yet. While it features very basic user authentication, it does not actually work as a chat server yet.

We are hoping to ship Telodendria v1.7.0-alpha4 by January of 2025. This release should be usable for communication between local users only. Additional features, including federation with other Matrix homeservers will be added in future releases.

You can help speed up development by sponsoring Telodendria or getting involved.

Sponsorship

Telodendria is maintained by a loosely-knit band of volunteers. The project currently has no sponsors and thus no source of income to pay for infrastructure costs and developer time. To ensure Telodendria's long-term success, please consider sponsoring the project.

You can make a recurring donation to Telodendria using LiberaPay. You can also make one-time donations using Stripe. If you would like to make a recurring donation larger than that allowed by LiberaPay, please contact Jordan Bancino over Matrix at @jordan:bancino.net or email at jordan@bancino.net.

Benefits

While there are no set sponsorship tiers at this time, sponsoring Telodendria is a mutually beneficial relationship. Depending on the amount you donate, you can get your name, logo, and website links on the Sponsors page, the project README, or the main website.

License

All of the code and documentation for Telodendria is licensed under a modified MIT license. The MIT license is an extremely permissive license that has very few restrictions. Please consult the LICENSE.txt file for the actual license text. It is important to note that the Telodendria license text differs from the original MIT license in the following ways:

• Where the MIT license states that the copyright notice and permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the software, the Telodendria requires the copyright notice and permission notice be included with all portions, regardless of the size, by omitting the word substantial.

The Telodendria logo in all its forms, including the ASCII representation, belongs solely to the Telodendria project. It must be used only to represent the official Telodendria project. You are free to use the logo in any way as long as it represents or links to the official project. If Telodendria is forked, the logo must be removed completely from the project, and optionally replaced by a different one.