Snikket is definitly not harder to set up than Synapse or Condinuwuity, the difference is mainly that Matrix is based on standard web technology, so if you have some knowledge in that already, XMPP can feel a bit alien since it is an actual protocol different from http(s).

Snikket makes it quite easy, but the extra complexity of hosting from home is probably better avoided for total beginners.

Yes, Matrix is a bit ahead with SFU calls (after depending on Jitsi Meet for a long time, which uses xmpp under the hood). But for most usecases it doesn’t matter so much. On a modern internet connection a SFU basically only starts being useful in calls with ten or more participants. For corporate board meeting calls maybe, but your family call is also fine without.

For now voice and video calls in xmpp only lightly touch the server and are mostly p2p. This comes with some scaling issues but for small groups of around 5 people it works fine.

Movim is a bit special, for other clients it doesn’t matter much.

Movim specifically works a bit better with ejabberd, who also provide easy to use containers.

Prosody is more of a Lego set to build your own server, so I don’t think they even provided official container images for a long time. There is https://snikket.org/ though which is an opinionated distribution of Prosody with easy to use containers. Sadly Snikket doesn’t play so well with Movim out of the box.

In general it is probably easier to start out with a rented VPS. You can move to your own server later on when you got the basics down. Since XMPP servers are quite lightweight they run fine on low end VPS that can be rented for as little as 1€/month.

At some point the benefit of extra RAM isn’t there anymore compared to what the CPU can actually run. With a CPU like that 8GB is probably sufficient and 16 would be merely nice to have for some additional caching.

I would go for the Wyse 5070 as a server. More RAM is good and the CPUs while somewhat slower are more power efficient.

The 4/5th gen Intel CPUs are the last gen that is really quite poor in power efficiency when mostly idling. 6/7gen made huge improvements in that regard.

Upgrading the storage should be possible quite easily.

For static sites, yes. To actually protect dynamic sites against AI crawlers, Cloudflare has to do much more than just caching.

And besides that, Cloudflare is a huge single point of failure and highly privacy invasive.

This is not how things work on the modern web. Did you just wake up from a 20 year coma?

https://f-droid.org/packages/se.lublin.mumla is not so bad as a mobile client for Mumble.

The servers are great, but the currently available clients are only great for non-corporate usecases IMHO.

Xmpp works great for 1:1 chats and small private groups, but there isn’t really an enterprise team chat client for it. Recently some promising projects came up trying to change that, but they are still too new to be serious contenders for that usecase specifically. Maybe in 1-2 years the situation will be different.

A Snikket server is cool.

Navidrome maybe, but Jellyfin also works for music.

If you switch to the dns-01 challenge you can just generate the certs on multiple servers hasselfree. And as a bonus you can get wildcard certs for subdomains.

Maybe overkill, but Peertube can definitely do that well.

Your server might have been hacked. There was a recent issue with a NodeJS software injecting a cryptominer onto other peoples servers, but I forgot the exact details.

What people say about Synapse is also somewhat outdated. These days it isn’t actually that much worse than Conduit (or forks), the main issue is that when you start joining older and bigger rooms the resource use goes through the roof, and that is also a problem with Conduit etc. Ultimately, this is a protocol issue and not an implementation issue.

There are multiple good XMPP mobile apps for Android: https://joinjabber.org/docs/apps/

The story on iOS is somewhat less good right now, but Monal is ok and Movim works quite well as a PWA in Safari.

Apparently a rebranded LiveKit, which is developed by an US American company…

XMPP is generally nicer to host due to lower resource requirements and better server management in general. The mobile apps are also more snappy and need much less battery, plus notifications are more reliable.

Matrix has somewhat more public rooms of FOSS projects you can join, but typically these projects are also available on IRC, which you can join via the excellent Biboumi gateway for XMPP.