Lot of sales for 4th of july (and ongoing ones) where you can pay $10-$14 for a YEAR of a small cheap VPS. Usually only has 1GB of memory, but that’s plenty to play around with and learn. If nothing else, a good cheap ipv4 you can use for some port forwarding. There are lots of options, but I’ve used racknerd and ethernetservers which have been fine.
I have my own server at home, but I bought two small ones to start learning Ansible with in a risk free way. Eventually plan to redo my main server with a complete Ansible setup, really want to hop on that “infrastructure as code” train.
Oh yeah, I briefly tried Prosody/XMPP (before a domain scalper stole a previous domain of mine because of a loophole with the TLD i chose) and it worked really well.
It’s a shame Matrix seems to be the current hot new thing when, with a bit of UX polish on all the apps, XMPP would work just as well if not even better.
XMPP works pretty well, but it’s not in the spotlight as much as Matrix right now. I get the sense that Matrix servers tend to be pretty heavy weight in comparison? Main problem with XMPP in my opinion is that there’s no “one true app” available for every platform. There’s something decent everywhere (with iOS being the worst supported, but getting better, Siskin is pretty solid), but it’d be really nice to have a decent app like Element everywhere so you could help your friends on different platforms better, and trust that they’re getting a similar experience. Conversations is kind of an amazing app on android, I like Dino on Linux, Siskin is pretty good on iOS… Not entirely sure what’s going on with Macs (I think you can get Dino to work, but otherwise I guess maybe Beagle?)… I’m REALLY not sure what’s going on with Windows.
But, por que no los dos! A lot of us host stuff as a hobby, so it can just be fun to set up an extra thing if you’ve got nothing better to do :P.
Snikket (which is run by a Prosody dev) is aiming to be the “one app” of XMPP. Their Android version is, IIRC, rebranded Conversations. Not sure on iOS/macOS but I think they have something there as well. And of course their server software is Prosody with a few extra plugins configured by default. All FOSS
I can confirm that the Snikket iOS app is rebranded Siskin :). Not sure about MacOS.
I’m really excited about Snikket, though. I hope it succeeds :).
Matrix is awful.
I will say that they have been putting a lot of effort into making it better, and it is better than it was, for sure. But it still sucks.
I’m picky about software FWIW. Maybe in another couple years they’ll have basic UX, security, and performance figured out.