The admin APIs are at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/tree/develop/docs/admi... and are fairly comprehensive. Agreed it's a screw-up that we don't provide an official web UI for it (but https://github.com/Awesome-Technologies/synapse-admin is pretty good).

I have no idea why you think it'd be acceptable for your server to randomly delete old messages from under you by default - I'd go nuts if my IMAP server or filesystem decided to spontaneously expire old data by default.

However, it's easy enough to flip the bit in the config to do so: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/ca2db5dd0c9fc430a.... If this is something that makes you hateful, I'm not sure it's Matrix's problem.

In terms of Element: yes, software has bugs, and we're working through them. weechat-matrix is very usable too, as is FluffyChat and a bunch of others.

> I have no idea why you think it'd be acceptable for your server to randomly delete old messages from under you by default [...]

IRC's discourse model is asynchronous and ephemeral, so if someone found IRC is enough then one will of course do expect messages to be ephemeral in any IRC replacements. Pretty sure that this is not a majority opinion, but this might be one reason.

While Matrix definitely tries to appeal to IRC users, it's absolutely not just a IRC replacement. It's been a conscious decision from Day 1 that history is important given that the default for any messaging system today is to store history. Honestly it feels like a massive improvement over the days of bouncers and logs hosted in the cloud.

That all being said, there are ways to make your rooms drop history if you wish through the config (and I believe it can be configured per room too).

Yes, that's a popular opinion that I do share (though more accurately, I occasionally want the ephemeral conversation that lasts not too long). But "I have no idea why" would be a stretch, hence the reply.

further IRC etc did not host the media files directly.

I mean, if synapse got actually working blob storage (S3, etc) support for media, that would make it a far less balooning problem. There is some option there for it and it all ends up on disk still so I assume its a backup strategy

You might be interested in https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse-s3-storage-provider, which provides S3 storage options for Synapse.

I personally run https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-media-repo/ which is basically a media server written in Go which has lots of bells and whistles for rentention, storage platforms and scaling.

i have and it leaves all media on the hard drive still

You might need to look at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse-s3-storage-provider#re...