Classic HN comment.
Yeah, $10/mo, + the time needed to setup everything + the time to maintain it + the security holes to patch yourself + the downtime because the instance rebooted for some reasons + the monitoring of the service + all the time wasted because you could have simply lived your life and paid the reasonable fees for the service in the first place.
The first sentence in your otherwise useful post doesn't feel helpful to the conversation.
Not at all, prosody and ejabberd both work flawlessly without all of that nonsense. If it's a shitty piece of software maybe, but then why even bother using it in the first place?
“All that nonsense”
Are the realities of running any software.
If you don't care about the uptime of your chat service you may as well not have one. Eventually those things will be the same.
I already have a VPS for other reasons, so I'm glad if I could get a self-hosted solution.
But that includes setting up and maintaining it, as well as troubleshooting when there's an issue.
For some, $10/month is a nice way to have all that worry-free.