Do not enter very large rooms (especially Matrix HQ!) and you'll be fine.

I know it sounds extreme, but you may want to ban Matrix HQ from the start and just infrom anyone wanting to join your instance if they are ok with that. This room alone is a spam anyway and it took >100GB of space on my database, cleaning wasn't simple.

Write me a message if you want any help 😊.

Depending on your use of Matrix you will run into memory and disk spaces issue pretty soon. Basically if you plan to participate in large public Matrix rooms it will not work on a cheap VPS because of that. However if you mainly use it for private messaging between friends etc. it will likely work.

That said, personally I think XMPP is better for that use-case as the mobile apps are easier to use and use less battery. The easiest way to set up a personal XMPP server for friends and family is https://snikket.org

XMPP servers are super resource efficient, so even the cheapest VPS will not have any problems with it.

I host mine (for two users + WhatsApp bridge) on a 4gb 1vcpu vm. When I was using a smaller vm with only 2gb of ram it would hang frequently due to memory exhausting and swapping. I'm using a debian image, and the different components of matrix are containers.

Probably less resource intensive: https://conduit.rs/.

Mine's running on a VM with 2c/4t 2GB of RAM it shares with my Lemmy instance and it's been working fine. I'm running Synapse, there's more lightweight alternatives as well.

The Matrix servers don't do all that much, it's pretty much just plumbing data streams and storing data. You need enough disk to store all the messages and reactions and enough bandwidth to sync the rooms, and that's about it. Most of the encryption is client-side for proper E2EE, so it just moves data around.

I would be very hesitant to switch to Matrix as I've had some bad experiences with it and it is prone to memory leaks.

If you are really that concerned you could switch to Briar. Briar is totally decentralized so it is very hard to censor. The downside is that you may not receive messages if your offline. You can get around this with briar mailboxes on a old phone.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

2 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

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