I only read about people using continuwuity and tuwunel, but apparently none are using conduit. When searching, I only find “hate” against conduit, but no actual reason why people prefer the fork, except some ominous comments stating that it is practically unmaintained (which is not true). I found that conduit has the majority of features implemented, except minor things like threads (which is still WIP, to be fair) and presence. Also, it is rock solid, only using minimal resources. It may be slow in development, taking a bit longer to implement a new feature, but not too much longer. Or am I missing something the others have to offer?
If you are running a conduit fork, what is your reason for leaving conduit, and if you are running conduit, why didn’t you switch?
If it is not obvious: I mean compared to conduit and its forks, not synapse, …
If you are running a conduit fork, what is your reason for leaving conduit, and if you are running conduit, why didn’t you switch?
Conduwuit (predecessor of Continuwuity and Tuwunel) hard-forked from Conduit and introduced breaking database changes. That is a significant people don’t easily “switch over”
It may be slow in development, taking a bit longer to implement a new feature, but not too much longer.
I would say its pace of development is very slow compared to the pace of Matrix in general. But if you only want the barebones features, you can use it.
Or am I missing something the others have to offer?
Feature-wise, Continuwuity offers email support, single-use registration token, policy server integration, user suspending, a ton more of admin commands, and some extra endpoints for Element Call. It is also actively working on OIDC-OAuth (so you can login with your IDP), and an ecosystem-wide Admin API. It also has an active community. I can’t speak for the other fork.
Lastly, I don’t think anyone “hate” conduit, the project is alright. It’s just not the topmost option.
some ominous comments stating that it is practically unmaintained (which is not true)
Objectively, I can see that the last commit to the default branch was in March 2026, and that the 10th newest commit was back in September 2025. Of these 10, 3 are new features and 6 are fixes and 1 is documentation. I also see in the issue tracker that no project developer replied to the two newest reports, which were reported 2 weeks and 2 months ago.
As a subjective opinion, the explanation that Conduit is essentially rock-solid and this doesn’t need much upkeep or commits, that is just not credible. The Git history shows fixes and new features, but at a rate that averages just one commit per month. And some of those commits are literally one-line changes.
But let’s suppose that the maintainers are uninterested in small UI or quality-of-life features, and only make changes when it crosses their threshold for what is “important” enough. That’s a choice, sure, but let’s see if that holds water. Here is the project’s response to an issue opened in January, with the response being in February that confirms a logic bug and schedules it for the next release.
That was three months ago. No updates. No mentioned branches or PRs or merges. All while this bug remains in place. And that’s understandable for FOSS project developers, for whom the project is not their day job.
But in any circumstances, the totality of the evidence does not inspire confidence, let alone a determination that Conduit is “rock solid”. And that’s even before looking at the code.
TL;DR: the premise of the question is wrong. Conduit is not maintained.
I thought about switching to the forks for new features, but I like that conduit is a nice boring piece of software that I’ve got set to auto-update so by the time I hear about a new update I’m usually running it.
I like boring server software. Excitement is not something I have time to enjoy.