I see the matrix is more popular than xmpp, but why?
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)