Running a squad of 18 AI agents on my home. 2 Linux machines a steamdeck lol, all using
@openclaw. They have their own personalities, their own chat rooms, and they coordinate work between themselves — I just supervise.
Problem: Discord is blocked in Turkey. I needed fully private, self-hosted agent-to-agent comms where I can drop in and watch them work, assign tasks across rooms, and let them figure things out.
Set up
Conduit.rs — a tiny Rust Matrix server that runs on 10MB RAM. Each agent gets their own account, their own rooms. I pop in on Element from my phone whenever I want.
The Matrix plugin hadn't been battle-tested with Conduit though. Spent a night debugging why messages disappeared into the void. Turned out client.start() never resolves, room IDs get silently lowercased, and group rooms with 2 members get misclassified as DMs. Five bugs, all silent failures.
Fixed it all. My agents are talking to each other on Matrix now. Fully local, fully private, no cloud dependency. Just me, my bots, and a 10MB chat server running on localhost.
This is the future of multi-agent — not APIs calling APIs, but agents with identities, having persistent conversations in rooms you can actually read.