I've been running synapse on a small VPS for the past few years. I got some of the bridges working too. Def bumps along the way, but its still the daily driver for me and about five other people.
Recently I spun up the new ESS Community Edition on a new VPS. Much easier to get up and running. I was delightfully surprised. although since that one uses kubernetes and other things I'm not familiar with getting bridges and other things I've become used to is going to require more learning on my part. Since ESS is so new, not a lot of newbie friendly howtos yet out there.
I've had mostly good luck with Matrix too. Been self-hosting since 2022 and while there have been frustrations it has been pretty stable for basic chat.
I think that in order to really have free speech, you need to own the platform. Because your freedom of speech doesn't mean that anyone else is obligated to listen to it or provide you a platform.
In that light, I think that peer to peer technologies seem really promising because it eliminates the technical know how and costs required for self-hosting.
Jami, Briar, and others come to mind. Retroshare. I feel like p2p is still in its infancy though, and the true easy, reliable, and private isn't quite there yet.
I'm a big fan of Matrix, and run a small homeserver for my family in friends. But if you really want to explore the frontiers peer to peer seems really intriguing because you don't need any server. https://tox.chat/ just to name one.
I'm a Matrix enthusiast, run my own homeserver and I've been playing around with Quiet today.
It has nowhere near the features of Matrix at this point, but it is useable and I'm having fun with it, and I really look forward to see progress on both projects. :)
As someone who runs a small Matrix server I haven't hit a lot of the issues, mentioned, but I appreciate them being raised and hopefully matrix.org can address them.
I'd also be interested in comparisons between Matrix and other Open source alternatives.
If you are either a current or former user of the vintage BBS system known as ISCABBS please help keep the history of this vintage computer platform alive by contributing your audio remembrances to the project.
It might be expensive for an organization to host, but for individual / small groups it can be as low as $6/mo. I've been running a small Matrix server on a DigitalOcean droplet for years now, and the $6/mo plan has been working fine for 5 users, and three bridges running on that server.
ISCABBS is a telnet accessible BBS that has been in operation since 1989. It is the oldest continuously operating free online community on the internet.
whoops should have said "telnet to bbs.iscabbs.com" up there. ISCABBS isn't as big as it used to be but we still have a good 30 users online at any given time.
Recently I spun up the new ESS Community Edition on a new VPS. Much easier to get up and running. I was delightfully surprised. although since that one uses kubernetes and other things I'm not familiar with getting bridges and other things I've become used to is going to require more learning on my part. Since ESS is so new, not a lot of newbie friendly howtos yet out there.
I remain optimistic.