Sorry to hear that :( There are two things we've tried to do to fix it:
1) Running Synapse really isn't that hard if you follow best practices... but I think we've done a bad job of communicating those best practices; instead Synapse's INSTALL.md lays out tonnes of different options and expects folks to pick their poison. I tried to fix this a few weeks ago by sitting down and recorded a dorky video to try to steer folks through best practices for setting up Synapse + certbot + Jitsi: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/04/06/running-your-own-secure-c.... (I need to extend it to coturn, but again, coturn should be straightforward. I don't think we should be baking TURN into Synapse though!). You could also shove everything in Docker and forget about it.
2) Peer-to-peer Matrix will let you get up and running without even needing a server. This is progressing alarmingly rapidly at the moment - https://p2p.riot.im is a version of Riot/Web which installs a homeserver (Dendrite) in your browser as a WASM service worker. It's alpha, but it mostly works pretty well, and is hopefully the shape of things to come - to let people have autonomy over their comms without ever needing to understand SSL, TURN, etc.
Thanks for the reply! I understand not wanting to re-implement entire servers within Synapse. Maybe an installer util would go a long way towards making setup more manageable. A step to automatically download and configure coturn, for example, could be very helpful.
I also understand that making things too turn-key (no pun intended) can be extremely difficult to do well and can also impede advanced configuration. But there is somewhat of an incongruity between the Matrix philosophy of keeping private servers vs. the expertise required to actually get that done.
1) Running Synapse really isn't that hard if you follow best practices... but I think we've done a bad job of communicating those best practices; instead Synapse's INSTALL.md lays out tonnes of different options and expects folks to pick their poison. I tried to fix this a few weeks ago by sitting down and recorded a dorky video to try to steer folks through best practices for setting up Synapse + certbot + Jitsi: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/04/06/running-your-own-secure-c.... (I need to extend it to coturn, but again, coturn should be straightforward. I don't think we should be baking TURN into Synapse though!). You could also shove everything in Docker and forget about it.
2) Peer-to-peer Matrix will let you get up and running without even needing a server. This is progressing alarmingly rapidly at the moment - https://p2p.riot.im is a version of Riot/Web which installs a homeserver (Dendrite) in your browser as a WASM service worker. It's alpha, but it mostly works pretty well, and is hopefully the shape of things to come - to let people have autonomy over their comms without ever needing to understand SSL, TURN, etc.