Toying with the idea of setting this up for myself, maybe a few bridges, maybe a few group chats on matrix itself. What kind of cost should I expect?
Matrix servers have the problem of highly variable resource use.
Basically if you only use it for some light chatting with friends and family and some niche topic public rooms it isn’t very heavy.
But if any user of your homeserver joins any busy rooms or uses the bridges to join busy public Telegram channels or such, it will quickly outgrow the resources of a reasonably priced VPS.
Personally I would rather recommend you to set up an xmpp server, which can include a gateway to Matrix and other services, but architecturally is much more lightweight and has better mobile clients.
How is the user experience compared to matrix? Is it easy to gateway towards matrix or other services? Can I easily join matrix or other communities servers?
I see a lot of people are now using matrix but not so many xmpp, but yeah it hoggs resources on my server too. Also I feel like it’s still pretty buggy…
Xmpp itself works great. The slidge.im bridges are relatively new and your mileage will vary. Matrix, Discord and Telegram works ok, Signal & Facebook messenger have issues right now, WhatsApp is a bit tricky to set up properly.
Better mobile clients? Have things changed this much in the least three years?
I found snikket to be quite decent, give it a whirl.
ooh! how do we bridge to matrix from xmpp server?
edit all i can find is how to do it from a matrix server
It basicallly allows you to remote control an existing Matrix account on a remote homeserver. Works quite well.
12 to 40 bucks a year depebding on which racknerd vps yiu need. I spend aboit 15 a yaet on mine but it only has me and my facebookessenger slidge bridge
Be careful. My disk usage is well over 8gb after bridging my WhatsApp and telegram chats…
In the clouds I would be worried about storage costs.
I think for matrix to be usable in a homelab setting, Matrix needs to enable a way to handle these huge data storage with prune or something similar.
@zygo_histo_morpheus If you don’t mind being powered by Oracle, the free tier OCI is pretty generous
I upvoted your comment but man I wouldn’t even take a freebie from Oracle. Just an absolutely rotten company and Larry Ellison is one of the worst humans on the planet.
