I see the matrix is more popular than xmpp, but why?
On a related note is anybody able to tell me why Matrix hosting is so darn expensive? It seems you need to self host to have bridges?
There are quite a few stories of communities shutting down their servers since the costs of duplicating all messages & attachments for all rooms for all DMs for all users on the server. Add to the mix that the implementation server in Python consumes a lot more resources, it’s not a big surprise. As such, everything centralizes around Matrix.org where they get an unreasonable amount of the network’s metadata.
Thanks that’s interesting
cant u just run a docker environment on a cheap hosting service or something ? (i am new to this)
Well sure but why would other hosts charge 50 a month? Seems a bit steep.
I think it’s just more difficult to set up than most self-hosted services?
But like, if you learn to do that yourself any old VPS will work.
You don’t have to self host to have bridges. Some instances provide them, I know pikaviestin.fi does, but they only accept Finnish citizens.
Im self hosting conduit and it was surprisingly easy to setup, and at this point just my mom and I are using it so ressource usage is OK. Otherwise I read that CPU can be tough in big chat rooms, and I assume a lot of things are copied on disk for federation which can also be costly. You can always de-federate to avoid these problems but at this point I don’t see much reason to self host if you’re only going to chat (signals does that just fine)
I know part of what makes it expensive is the propagation of messages in complex rooms (I.e. the official matrix room). I haven’t hosted matrix servers myself, but data.haus did which I was on until it sunsetted late last year due to this issue.
