[sweden]

I have been running my own Matrix instance with federation on my 20 dollar/month Linode VPS for 5 years already.

I use between some friends and family and I'm also connected to massive channels like the official "Element Android" and "Element Web/Desktop".

And it runs... just fine. The server can be a bit performance hungry but I also host plenty of other services on my VPS (email, HTTP server, Seafile, VPN, etc) and I never noticed any degradation in performance in any of them.

They have been making a lot of progress in improving the performance of the Synapse server and it is very usable now. And it is not difficult to configure at all, it's easier than configuring Prosody.

I would say that the bottleneck now is more about improving the UX and the Voip capabilities of the clients.

[southerntofu]

I would be interested in average resource usage per user and/or per channel: CPU/RAM/disk, if you can provide the details.