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https://continuwuity.org/

It's a fork of a fork or Conduit.

Starting point based on what? Do you plan to use it personally to join many large channels from FOSS projects? If so, you need to plan for a relativrly beefy VPS, like 4 core, 8gb ram, 100gb+ ssd storage.

But for small private chats with no federation a cheap minimum VPS can work.

If you want my personal recommendation I would avoid hosting Matrix. A well federated server is costly to run and not really worth the hassle and a small private chat server with bridges etc can be done equally well or better with XMPP.

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.

That must have been a severly misconfigured server then. Normally history is stored on the server and synced on demand via MAM.

Of course with modern e2ee you can't actually decrypt old history on new devices, but that is an intentional feature with PFS.

Xmpp has no marketing budget and a lot of people just decided it is old and always share bad experiences with it from 15 years ago 🤷

Well, this is kind of work in progress for XMPP and DeltaChat doesn't support it. But you can for example try out https://movim.eu/ which is a webbased xmpp client (with PWA app) which does support screensharing in small group calls.

Matrix stans mentally block out the many issues it has, so take everything they say with a grain of salt 😅

These days not so much, but you might find their contracts with the military also objectionable.

But they 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.

But personally I would not recommend Stout either as it is not a serious project nor does it federate. Maybe look into XMPP or DeltaChat.

You must have used a very outdated client (like Pidgin) because history is syncronized via the server reliably since 10+ years on xmpp with clients that support the MAM standard.

Well, the neighbourhood is even worse...

The servers are great, but the currently available clients are only great for non-corporate usecases IMHO.

Xmpp works great for 1:1 chats and small private groups, but there isn't really an enterprise team chat client for it. Recently some promising projects came up trying to change that, but they are still too new to be serious contenders for that usecase specifically. Maybe in 1-2 years the situation will be different.

A Snikket server is cool.

Navidrome maybe, but Jellyfin also works for music.