I got Element on my desktop, Schildichat on my phone. Bridged to all other messengers I used. IRC is handled with Heisenbridge. Before this I used weechat+bitlbee. Matrix is better, more capable, but way heavier, on both the server side and client side. I even dabbled in XMPP but in the end just bridged it into Matrix as it's not much better by itself (though it also supports extensions and can connect to many IM networks). The clients are buggy, especially on Android, they overheat the phone for no reason (when in use. Notifications are handled via push so background usage is great). But XMPP wasn't better in any other way so Matrix remains my go-to solution.
- OCI free tier VPS with static ipv4 and ipv6, haproxy proxying requests over wireguard to my old laptop at home
- the old laptop at home running the show. Debian, Docker, ZFS. 16 GB of RAM is enough to host all I need for personal use. Battery is a built-in UPS.
I can even move this laptop and keep it connected via LTE. The laptop cost me 60 eur (Thinkpad T430 with i5), RAM upgrade to 16 GB about 20 euros and 2x1 TB SSDs for the ZFS mirror about 100 euros. Best setup I ever had.
As a Fediverse user, I don't even care about these instances. What I am looking for is the communities to join, some handle to follow, but those are harder to find ;( I won't switch to Lemmy as a long time Friendica user, that kinda breaks the point of Fediverse
As a heavy Matrix/Synapse user, I just use the tox bridge to matrix (mx-puppet-tox). I need access to messaging from multiple devices and Tox doesn't make this easy iirc.
In EU the store provides 2 years warranty by law. And you can return any product bought online within 14 days. They cannot sell it as new again. That's the reason for the cost.
Now when you consider that eastern Europe has these prices too, where salaries barely crossed 1k euros per month (that's gross, in both senses of the word).
And generally reading how people make 200k and similar salaries seems just unfathomable to me xD it's not like we have cheaper stuff here, there are cases when groceries are cheaper in Germany and Switzerland than in eastern Europe. Same goes for rent, at least outside big cities.
Whenever I needed to change IPv6 glue records I had to contact support. And even after that, the webUI did not reflect the current configuration, so I couldn't even change IPv4 glue records after that. Other than that I was ok with namecheap.
Quick summary: I worked at a webhosting company as Linux admin, am a big self-hoster, have some hardware experience in electronics repair. I am looking to relocate out of my country.
