Recommended Homeservers

Your Matrix account lives on a homeserver, the way an email address lives at a provider: @you:nether.im and @you:tchncs.de are accounts on different servers that can still talk to each other. That’s federation, and it’s the point of Matrix — no single company owns the network.

Which server you register on matters more than people expect, so here’s our honest guidance.

Two paths

If you want to be part of Nether, you want an account on nether.im — see joining for how registration codes work. We keep registration closed because we’re a small, moderated, 18+ community, not a public utility.

If you just want a Matrix account — to try the network, to join our public rooms, or because the interview isn’t for you — register on a good public server below. You lose nothing socially: federation means you can join the same rooms and DM the same people from any server.

One thing to know before choosing: Matrix accounts don’t move. There’s no real account migration between servers — switching later means a new account and rejoining your rooms. It’s worth five minutes of thought now.

Please don’t default to matrix.org

matrix.org is the flagship server run by the Matrix Foundation, and because it’s the default suggestion in most clients, an enormous share of the network lives there. That’s bad for everyone:

• It recentralizes a decentralized network. If most accounts sit on one server, Matrix inherits the failure modes it was built to escape — one outage, one policy change, one point of pressure.
• It’s slow and overloaded precisely because everyone piles onto it, and moderation at that scale is necessarily blunt.
• Federation only stays healthy if people actually use it. Every account on a small, well-run server is a vote for the network existing at all.

The Foundation itself would rather you register elsewhere. So: register elsewhere.

What to look at when choosing

• Who runs it and why — a person or org you can name, funded by donations or their own pocket, beats an anonymous free-for-all.
• The rules — read them. They tell you what the community values and whether your content is welcome. Check the age requirement.
• Registration friction — a captcha or email verification is a good sign; it keeps the spam out.
• Retention quirks — some servers auto-delete old messages by policy. Feature or dealbreaker, depending on you.
• Community fit — servers have cultures. Somebody posting NSFW art wants a server whose rules say yes in writing; somebody who lives in self-hosting forums will feel at home where that crowd already is.

Our picks

Facts below verified against each server’s own site as of July 2026 — registration policies do change, so check the server’s page before recommending it onward.

tchncs.de is our default suggestion for a newcomer who just wants a solid, boring, reliable account: long track record, clear rules, ad-free, donation-funded. Registration uses a Google reCAPTCHA — mildly ironic for a privacy-friendly server, but it ends there.

nope.chat is a good pick if “no tracking, no logging, no ads” is your first filter. Note its retention policy: messages and media are deleted after about 180 days by default. If you want your history to be ephemeral, that’s a feature; if you want an archive, it isn’t.

4d2.org suits the technical, privacy-oriented crowd — it’s run by a US public-benefit corporation and offers an unusually rich set of bridges to other networks. Registration requires a real (non-disposable) email and doesn’t work over VPN/Tor, so weigh that against your threat model. 18+.

cutefunny.art is the recommendation for artists and fans whose work gets them purged from mainstream platforms over taste. It’s an otaku-culture NSFW server whose rules take the same stance our Code of Conduct does: drawn fiction needs no justification, and the hard lines sit where reality gets involved — real CSAM, advocacy, and photorealistic imagery are banned. In our community’s experience it’s reliably welcoming to furry artists too, including cub art. 18+, registration is open with a token published on their rules page (VPN signups blocked, VPN use afterwards fine).

None of these are affiliated with us; we’re recommending them because they’re well-run, not because we answer for them. Each server’s rules are its own — what flies on nether.im may not fly there, and vice versa.