Selfhosted

Few of the answers given were concrete. So here's my take.

I am able to run singleuser Continuwuity on a 8GB RAM Pi machine with 4 cores, and join many large rooms (around >=1000 users, although the number of homeservers in the room is a more suitable metric). It would use around 2GB RAM, but you can tune it for less (basically reduce cache values, but ask in the room for more advice).

After a few months the database hovers at around 2GB, because the database uses zstd compression by default. It's not anyhow a major problem like Synapse, just don't use HDD for storage and you should be fine.

For best experience, I also selfhost a dedicated caching resolver (unbound) for continuwuity. That takes like a few hundred more MBs of memory.

Given the fact you'd like to play around with it, a mid-tier VM/VPS (2CPU, 2GB RAM, 20GB SSD) is a reasonable starting choice. For a non-federating server, it can take a lot less resource than this.

Follow up question for voice/video servers in general.

If I want to host a server that allows video calls, do I need GPU hardware acceleration?

I have ran Synapse natively on 1 CPU 1GB RAM VPS for years. But it fills up a lot of disk space, eapecially with larger rooms, so get at least 100GB? (I had 20GB on my VPS, and with 4 regular users, was using up 15GB)

If you are looking at (new) official ESS Community, they recommend 2 CPU, 2GB RAM minimum for Kubernetes.

Conduit, around 100 users, barely breaks 0% usage in a Intel i5 micro PC. RAM is around 1GB used.

Continuwuity... Don't use synapse, too bloated.

Most of the requirements are going to be for the database, and that depends on:

1. How many active users you expect
2. How many large rooms you or your users join

I left many of the large Matrix spaces I was in, and mine is now mostly just 1:1 chats or a group chat with a handful of friends. Given that low-usage case, I can run my server on a Pi 3 with 4 GB of RAM quite comfortably. I don't do that in practice, but I do have that setup as a backup server - it periodically syncs the database from my main server - and works fine. The bottleneck there, really, is the SD card storage since I didn't want an external SSD hanging off of it.

Even when I was active in several large Matrix spaces/rooms, a USFF Optiplex with a quad core i5, 8 GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD was more than enough to run it comfortably alongside some other services like LibreTranslate.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #89 for this comm, first seen 13th Feb 2026, 15:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I'd like to set up a matrix server on my home server (or a xmpp server) but I haven't been able to figure how to do that. All the docs talk about setting up a vps with a domain name.I don't have a vps or a domain name and don't wanna have to pay monthly to a hobby. (I'm poor in a poor country)

Self hosted XMPP easy mode

https://github.com/snikket-im/snikket-selfhosted

As others have already alluded to, Matrix is a bit odd in that regard as it runs a distributed database and the resource requirements depend on how much of the matrix network is mirrored on it. A single power-user can cause huge resource use just by connecting to a lot of federated active rooms. On the other hand a server that is mostly used as a private family chat can run on a modern RasberryPI without much problems.

Synapse or Conduwinity etc. makes little difference in praxis as both need to do the same database merging operations.

Why the hell people keep saying Continuwity. I can’t find any software with that name. Do they mean Conduit? I’m so confused. The two words are nothing alike.