Selfhosted

Voice chat works out of the box with Matrix.

It uses WebRTC and tries to do P2P connections. Note that this leaks your IP to the other caller and vice versa, but it's also quite fast as you can establish a direct connection.

If P2P fails it will try to fallback to your configured TURN server and use that one for relaying.

However not every instance has one (as TURN servers are usually not that modern and straight forward...) and if this is the case it will fallback to Matrix's global TURN servers.

XMPP is also still a thing and IMO much easier to host (at least ejabberd is). Look into Movim, which looks quite nice as a discord replacement on top of XMPP.

Setting up Element Call on my instance was difficult on its own, I understand why Synapse doesn’t come with it out of the box, essentially you spin up Matrix’s JWT service for authenticating clients and it if approved forwards the connection to the Livekit ports which must be opened on your firewall (ie port forwarded), otherwise people will not be able to connect to calls.

Big PITA and in my experience, on my home network, can conflict with games with VOIP chats so don’t follow the default 50000:55000 port range Livekit recommends or you’ll run into issues like I did, each person consumes 2 ports so adjust the range to your need.

Edit: I don’t suggest running Element Call standalone, it has issues of its own, once you get Livekit and JWT running and follow This guide you should have your element call support in Synapse now, pro-tip for those running synapse behind docker and get confused on the whole ./well-known part of the documentation you can edit your ./well-known in your homeserver.yaml file like such:

serve_server_wellknown: true

extra_well_known_client_content:
  optional: client
  "org.matrix.msc4143.rtc_foci": [
      {
          "type": "livekit",
          "livekit_service_url": "https://livekit-jwt.your.domain/"
      }
  ]

https://matrix-construct.github.io/tuwunel/deploying/docker.html?highlight=voice#voice-communication

tuwunel seems to have some docker guides for how to set up voice & docker.

I couldn't figure out how to sign up for matrix server. Maybe there are peer tube videos.

Have you Trier ESS?