They (Element / New Vector) got a major early investment in 2018 from Status, a cryptocurrency/web3 company, and later in 2021 an even bigger one in relation to Protocol Labs, who peddle their own cryptocurrency.

XMPP obviously. Have a look at https://joinjabber.org/

This is a fundamental issue of the Matrix protocol, yes. For regular small scale use it doesn’t matter so much, and the state history gets reset every time you do a room upgrade, which is another annoying “feature” of Matrix, but it eases the fundamental problem a bit.

But IMHO the Matrix protocol is a child of the Bitcoin hype era and is built on a similar data-structure that is inherently impossible to scale and the developers of Matrix should have realized that early on. Their bosses back then actually did, but they spun it off as a separate company and got some crypto-currency investments so the can was kicked down the road and here we are…

https://kanboard.org/ is easy to run and works well.

Ghost in the machine 🤷

Impossible to tell and it sometimes happens.

There is a better, community maintained fork now: https://github.com/matterbridge-org/matterbridge

https://hypersomnia.io/ can be played in the browser and probably also selfhosted.

The XMPP channel search has a few channels that are not assorted geekery, but yeah most of it is.

You could also look into hosting a distributed Garage cluster for S3 compatible media storage with a few other people. Most fediverse software including Lemmy is compatible with that for image storage etc.

Snikket is definitly not harder to set up than Synapse or Condinuwuity, the difference is mainly that Matrix is based on standard web technology, so if you have some knowledge in that already, XMPP can feel a bit alien since it is an actual protocol different from http(s).

Snikket makes it quite easy, but the extra complexity of hosting from home is probably better avoided for total beginners.

Yes, Matrix is a bit ahead with SFU calls (after depending on Jitsi Meet for a long time, which uses xmpp under the hood). But for most usecases it doesn’t matter so much. On a modern internet connection a SFU basically only starts being useful in calls with ten or more participants. For corporate board meeting calls maybe, but your family call is also fine without.

For now voice and video calls in xmpp only lightly touch the server and are mostly p2p. This comes with some scaling issues but for small groups of around 5 people it works fine.

Movim is a bit special, for other clients it doesn’t matter much.

Movim specifically works a bit better with ejabberd, who also provide easy to use containers.

Prosody is more of a Lego set to build your own server, so I don’t think they even provided official container images for a long time. There is https://snikket.org/ though which is an opinionated distribution of Prosody with easy to use containers. Sadly Snikket doesn’t play so well with Movim out of the box.

In general it is probably easier to start out with a rented VPS. You can move to your own server later on when you got the basics down. Since XMPP servers are quite lightweight they run fine on low end VPS that can be rented for as little as 1€/month.

The problem is that “Discord” means something else for almost anyone and there is no alternative that 100% covers all the usecases.

For many public chats, IRC with a modern server and client is perfectly suitable, and for my private gaming sessions Mumble is as voice chat is doing fine even though friends are complaining that they can’t just use it in a browser.

For general IM stuff XMPP is best, but I guess few people use Discord for that. Matrix is in general slow and clunky, no real point of using that except if you are forced to because some very specific FOSS projects insist on using it.

P.S.: I mostly use IRC through a XMPP gateway.

At some point the benefit of extra RAM isn’t there anymore compared to what the CPU can actually run. With a CPU like that 8GB is probably sufficient and 16 would be merely nice to have for some additional caching.

I would go for the Wyse 5070 as a server. More RAM is good and the CPUs while somewhat slower are more power efficient.

The 4/5th gen Intel CPUs are the last gen that is really quite poor in power efficiency when mostly idling. 6/7gen made huge improvements in that regard.

Upgrading the storage should be possible quite easily.

For static sites, yes. To actually protect dynamic sites against AI crawlers, Cloudflare has to do much more than just caching.

And besides that, Cloudflare is a huge single point of failure and highly privacy invasive.

This will just make them sound more believable when they hallucinate. LLMs can conceptually not be made to not lie, even if all the info they are trained on is 100% accurate.

This is not how things work on the modern web. Did you just wake up from a 20 year coma?