Cool.

I spun up a self hosted matrix server a few days ago using codex, docker compose, and ansible. Stupidly easy to do now. I'm running it in Hetzner on a 3.99 euro/month vm. It backs up every few hours to a bucket and I have a few integrity scripts to monitor the backups actually happen. I did that because I was getting a bit frustrated with the flaky integration with Whatsapp and Slack in openclaw. I had it up and running in half an hour with only minimal prompting.

Whatsapp kind of works but you end up chatting with yourself and then open claw posts messages as you. Not ideal. You can't easily create new users (or bot users) in Whatsapp. It probably has some kind of bot api of course but I did not explore that much.

I never quite managed to get Slack working with open claw. I tried for a few hours. I think the Slack team is asleep at the wheel snoozing through this whole AI thing. If somebody there is still paying attention to things like this, maybe make some noise internally. Anyway, they made it stupidly hard to do anything productive via their APIs. The UI for managing permissions is a disgraceful hell of complexity. Add permission. UI freezes for fifteen seconds. Reloads automatically. Unfreezes. Add the next. And whatever you do, there's always one more permission you forgot. *end rant*

Relative to Whatsapp and Slack, Matrix is stupidly easy to integrate with open claw, codex, or whatever. We're retiring Slack now as I see uses for agent driven chat bots everywhere now and I want to get rid of any kind of friction around bot related plumbing. I have no use for platforms that intentionally cripple that or treat as a toll booth.

With Matrix, you just create a bot user manually or via an API. Set a password, get an access token and do whatever. No API limits. No faff with QR codes. No permission hell (Slack). It just works. Well documented API. End to end encryption. Etc. Create as many bot users as you need. Nobody is bean counting API calls, numbers of users, etc. Refreshingly easy.

Other OSS messaging platforms are available of course. I do not have a strong opinion as to which is better yet. But now I want a Matrix cli that can do admin, message sending, and all the rest. Probably already exists. But if it doesn't I might end up generating one. Macli might be a good name.