[pmlnr]

You are not wrong at all.

That said, self hosting matrix seems to be similarly hard to execute at this point in time - simply too many opaque and moving components on the server side.

The riot client is also incredibly slow for my taste.

[masterfooo]

Installing Synapse is very easy actually with Pip, however as this OP showed that using your own identity server is also necessity. FOr that you want https://github.com/kamax-matrix/mxisd

[pmlnr]

But this is what I've been pointing at; to self host XMPP with multiple domains and per domain settings, I need prosody, nothing else. Not identity server, no video servers, etc. This is the based of my problems.

[Arathorn]

on what platform is riot slow? if android, give riotx a try - it’s roughly 6x faster.

in terms of too many opaque moving components serverside; the baseline is just a homeserver. pip install matrix-synapse and off you go. configure your client not to use an identity or integration server if you are worried about them.