is setting up and maintaining an xmpp /jabber server and clients easier/difficult than matrix?
i have been mulling the switch to a selfhosted thing for some time now but i need something that can run on low resources but isnt overly complicated
i have been mulling the switch to a selfhosted thing for some time now but i need something that can run on low resources but isnt overly complicated
The client setup in XMPP and Matrix seem to have the same usual steps (username and password). No big differences here, other than Element defaults to matrix.org to create an account (which contributes to centralization).
I'd say that XMPP clients are generally better than matrix's ones. Maybe because matrix is an immature and younger protocol, but Element seems to be the only client that implements everything and UI is confusing and it's electron.
And a personal preference, I like using my GPG keys to encrypt my conversations when possible in XMPP. This wouldn't be possible in matrix.
IMHO, the basic prosody setup is a bit simpler, but with the "extra" configuration such as retention policies, they're equal in setup effort.
On the other hand, prosody is an order of magnitute easier to maintain and administer. synapse is too brittle, and its not uncommon to use gigabytes of memory, while prosody's resource usage is barely noticible.
On the occasions that I wanted to look under the hood and skim the code, I felt more confortable understanding and hacking on prosody.
Overall, I found synapse to be needlessly complex and big. I don't know if that's because it's the first implementation and it accumulated a bunch of legacy code, or that's something that comes with Matrix itself.
could we say, define 2-3 days attachment retention rule to save on space?
As for storage, it really depends on how many and how big pictures or other files are shared. Clients like Conversations will compress images into a few hundred KB by default, so you can imagine how many will fit into even 1GB. Text messages take even less space.