A self-hosted Matrix homeserver and personal assistant for a small group of people who wanted to own their communications.
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boto.im is a privately operated Matrix homeserver. This page explains what that means, why it matters, and what you can and can’t do here.
Matrix is an open messaging protocol — think of it like email, except for real-time chat. Anyone can run a server, and accounts on different servers can talk to each other directly. Your boto.im account can message anyone on matrix.org, or any other Matrix server in the world, without those messages routing through a central company.
boto.im is one of those servers. It’s run by one person, for a small group of people, as a personal project. There’s no business behind it, no investors, no roadmap. It exists because owning your own communications infrastructure is straightforward enough to be worth doing.
Self-hosted means the server runs on hardware rented directly — not AWS, not Google Cloud, not a managed platform that adds its own layer of data access. The only people with access to this server are the operator.
Messages in end-to-end encrypted rooms are unreadable by the server — only the participants hold the keys. Most rooms on boto.im use encryption by default. Unencrypted room content and basic metadata (who talked to whom, when) are accessible to the operator, as they are on any Matrix server. This is the baseline of how Matrix works — if that matters to you, use encrypted rooms.
No data is sold, shared, or used for advertising. boto.im is not a business. The services running here — search, file sharing, notifications — are all self-hosted for the same reason: to keep your data on infrastructure you can actually account for.
Registration isn’t open to the public. Accounts are created manually for people the operator knows. If you’re reading this and want access, reach out via Matrix at @admin:boto.im. If you don’t have a Matrix account yet, create one at app.element.io on the public network and message from there.
boto.im is a small server for people who know each other. The rules are minimal because they should be obvious.
These rules are intentionally short. If something feels like it might be a problem, it probably is — ask first. The operator’s call is final.