Falken

You must have triggered some vegan to get a downvote. Yeah you need the 9 essential amino acids in your diet as your body can’t synthesize them. They’re called essential for a reason.

Sure, that’s assuming the OP or those looking for a chart like this care about such things. This comment comes off across a bit as moral posturing.

The specific distro doesn’t really matter. What matters is package choice (being able to do the few things you listed with the apps you would like to use). I guess if you’re among the Debian evangelists you probably value stability more than any other consideration. Just pick some server distro or Debian again.

Even if your security oriented it seems many frown upon any self hosting whatsoever.

I got a small team in school to all adopt my self hosted Matrix as a chat solution for a project we were working on throughout the year. It was great. Everyone jumped back to Discord after we graduated though.

I heard someone say that the messages on Matrix are basically replicated on every server that is federated with another. I don’t know if this is true, but that’s a crazy amount of network traffic if so. I’ve also heard anecdotally that the protocol itself is pretty complicated.

UI/UX is incredibly important in on-boarding and retaining users.

My main problem with live chat is its ephemeral nature. So you can end up having people asking the same thing that someone else asked but the previous answer is buried/lost. Forums are good because you can index and search.

I didn’t know about Rome. I may check it out. I did run Dendrite but it’s still pretty intensive, but much better than Synapse.

Honestly a forum is much better than the endless stream of live chat that is basically Discord and Matrix, et al.

IRC > XMPP > Matrix > Discord.

Matrix is heavy. I ran my own instance once and it is very resource intensive (even using Dendrite) even if you have only joined a handful of rooms. XMPP chat gives most of the same things I need for chat and is much lighter but no one uses it (sadly). IRC deserves a mention for something that is rock solid and simple and will still be around after Matrix and Discord (if they ever end), however people can’t post their meme pics or their emojis so it doesn’t appeal to younger people.

Concerning Discord. I literally only made an account because I had classmates that made a server.