[Syonyk]

My main problem with Matrix (which I'm willing to work around because of the benefits of a federated, self hosted, encrypted chat system) is that it seems to assume everyone has a lot of high end, modern hardware, at all ends of the system.

Synapse is fine until someone on the homeserver starts joining a bunch of rooms, then you'd better have a lot of RAM for it.

And Element, while a perfectly good client, is the standard "bloated electron app" option that chews 700MB of RAM and lags, entering text, on a Raspberry Pi 4.

There are alternatives, but they tend to have weird issues, at least last time I messed with them, in how they handle some of the corner cases of encryption.

[topdancing]

I've used Matrix for the past couple of years for work chat system, and I personally think that the thing is a fad at best.

Synapse is simply awful as a server implementation, and the clients are just simply bloated.

But if you are looking for a good federated, self hosted, and encrypted chat solution, for my own private chat system; I've gone back to XMPP - I've settled on:

* ejabberd (which is in Erlang so just by definition is going to perform leagues better than Python) - prosody also works fine (especially for "lower end" servers) - though both need a bit of configuration at first install

* conversations.im on my Android phone

* dino.im on my desktop (which recently added calling capabilities back to phones: https://fosstodon.org/@dino/106228549009869402 )

* (if you're on a Windows desktop): gajim.org is still making releases and works (including E2EE)

I do not know of a good iOS client for XMPP right now, but these three fully support OMEMO for E2EE and I've had no issues talking to others on them.