A walk through of installing Synapse+Riot+Jitsi from scratch on Debian

Actually setting up a server is not difficult. Check out [VIDEO] for setting one up with video conferencing. Finding a server is not difficult - in the worst case you take the default server. And given the server is not locked down, you have access to all other servers (and their users) as well. So I don't really get where you are going with this.

> How many users does Matrix have? It's difficult to say, as the French government [0], German armed forces [1], and several thousand independent users/corporations/groups run their own servers. What we can determine is that matrix.org on its own has >10 million accounts [2] (search for "global visible accounts" in the link). > Hosting an own server is not possible on a small root server you can get for 5 EUR/USD a month, it requires signifcant [sic] resources A direct example of setting up Matrix is shown here [3], using a $20USD/month Digital Ocean droplet. It's a reasonable approximation, though inexact, as we don't know how many users this server will be supporting. This example is thrown further off, as it's the Matrix project lead setting up the server. He's likely in many rooms with high user counts and, as high user counts dramatically increase resource needs, likely needs more RAM and CPU than someone setting up a server for a group of friends. I think it's gotten much easier to stand up a matrix-synapse server than when you last tried, and suspect you left with a bad taste after joining popular rooms that (due to how many users they have) lag much more than you'd typically experience. Perhaps I'm wrong and you did everything right just last week and still don't like it, but I'd encourage more people to see for themselves :) [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]

Was your experience with Matrix bad because of the server setup or the Element client app? If server, I found this video to be super helpful: [VIDEO]

Matrix servers are now fairly simple to deploy. [VIDEO] I do wish the Element team moved a bit quicker at attacking Slack head-on. Element isn't super polished yet nor does it implement all the features built into the server/spec. So there is some catching up to do there. But the project is more than ready to use today at a large org and it includes a ton more features than what you get out of the box with an off the shelf XMPPd. [LINK]

You might want to consider Matrix, where admittedly we do have phone-home stats, but you have to explicitly opt in to them during installation if you want to participate. ( [VIDEO] in the video in the original post here)

@Arathorn, proud operator of Synapse (for 2+ years) chiming in! Another superb conference talk and thank you for all you do. We're running an ancient build. Is your Synapse installation walk-through [1] still the latest/greatest guidance in getting started, for those looking to refresh their environment? [1] [VIDEO]