In the end matrix has the issue that federation seems less widely used than it maybe should be. It was a concern I had when looking at it, and when I spoke to the author of conduit (rust matrix server) i made the point that easy deployment should be a primary goal. The existing python server seems non trivial to deploy.
I think that’s still true, I’d you want a distributed setup like that it has to be as close to trivial to setup as possible. Email has shown that complex setups cause centralized solutions.
I've installed several. It's fairly simple. The hardest part of setup was reading the quotes for the config files, because there were very many and not all were written clearly back then.
Lack of federating is a real problem, though. I don't federate. It seems too easy for a malicious user to overrequest data and screw over your budget server, and I've heard of it leading to a lot of resource usage nightmares.
> The existing python server seems non trivial to deploy.
This really isn't true (and hasn't been since Matrix exited beta in 2019). `apt-get install matrix-synapse` or `pip install matrix-synapse`, edit the config, and `synctl start` and off you go.
I launched my own matrix server for my company two years ago and I’ve never had to do a thing with it. It gets frequent use by ~10 people, so not huge, but it’s been quite easy to deploy and maintain.
I think that’s still true, I’d you want a distributed setup like that it has to be as close to trivial to setup as possible. Email has shown that complex setups cause centralized solutions.