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.
Better mobile clients? Have things changed this much in the least three years?
I found snikket to be quite decent, give it a whirl.
You might wanna check out this article: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/matrix-vs-xmpp/
I found it after I already settled with snikket.im The mobile application is reliable and there is Conversation as desktop client. From my point of view, the audio and video quality of Snikket are way better than Matrix.
It worth mentioning that initially I wanted to set up a Matrix server also, but I had second thoughts because I knew how resource intensive are the mobile app and the server also.
@tuxec @zygo_histo_morpheus Is “soyware” related to the pejorative “soyboy”?
I don’t know. I read it as “an interior piece of software”
I pay 6.84€ a month for a VPS plus 4.65€ a year for the domain. That gets me a VPS with 4 cores and 8GB of RAM so in addition to Matrix, I can also fit a few Fediverse services, Nextcloud, a homepage, …
Since you seem happy : Any recommendations for VPS provider ?
I’m with netcup.com and I’ve been happy. But some people complained their support isn’t the best and they sometimes don’t answer. I’m not sure about the details as I’ve never needed support. Maybe you want to ask someone else. And make sure to choose the correct server location as most of their servers are located in Europe and you don’t want that latency if you’re living in the USA.
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.
