I recommend Forgejo over Gitea, and you definitely need an AI scraper blocker like Anubis in front of it as otherwise they will kill your VPS rather quickly, as these AI scrapers absolutely love to scrape code forges.

This seems like something that would really benefit from better language support. I saw the translations folder in the repo, but you should probably get it linked up to a Weblate instance or similar and have people start contribute different languages asap.

Collabora Office works independent of Nextcloud. It can be nicely integrated into the lightweight https://www.filestash.app/ frontend for example.

I recently ended up replacing OnlyOffice with Collabora Office (Libreoffice based). While architecturally less efficient that OnlyOffice in theory, for my usecase where I rarely check some documents in Filestash it actually ended up using less server resources when idle than OnlyOffice (to my surprise).

UI wise they is no big difference IMHO, but docx etc. compatibility is slightly worse.

They (Element / New Vector) got a major early investment in 2018 from Status, a cryptocurrency/web3 company, and later in 2021 an even bigger one in relation to Protocol Labs, who peddle their own cryptocurrency.

XMPP obviously. Have a look at https://joinjabber.org/

This is a fundamental issue of the Matrix protocol, yes. For regular small scale use it doesn’t matter so much, and the state history gets reset every time you do a room upgrade, which is another annoying “feature” of Matrix, but it eases the fundamental problem a bit.

But IMHO the Matrix protocol is a child of the Bitcoin hype era and is built on a similar data-structure that is inherently impossible to scale and the developers of Matrix should have realized that early on. Their bosses back then actually did, but they spun it off as a separate company and got some crypto-currency investments so the can was kicked down the road and here we are…

https://kanboard.org/ is easy to run and works well.

Ghost in the machine 🤷

Impossible to tell and it sometimes happens.

There is a better, community maintained fork now: https://github.com/matterbridge-org/matterbridge

https://hypersomnia.io/ can be played in the browser and probably also selfhosted.

The XMPP channel search has a few channels that are not assorted geekery, but yeah most of it is.

Snikket is definitly not harder to set up than Synapse or Condinuwuity, the difference is mainly that Matrix is based on standard web technology, so if you have some knowledge in that already, XMPP can feel a bit alien since it is an actual protocol different from http(s).

Snikket makes it quite easy, but the extra complexity of hosting from home is probably better avoided for total beginners.

Yes, Matrix is a bit ahead with SFU calls (after depending on Jitsi Meet for a long time, which uses xmpp under the hood). But for most usecases it doesn’t matter so much. On a modern internet connection a SFU basically only starts being useful in calls with ten or more participants. For corporate board meeting calls maybe, but your family call is also fine without.

For now voice and video calls in xmpp only lightly touch the server and are mostly p2p. This comes with some scaling issues but for small groups of around 5 people it works fine.

Movim is a bit special, for other clients it doesn’t matter much.

Movim specifically works a bit better with ejabberd, who also provide easy to use containers.

Prosody is more of a Lego set to build your own server, so I don’t think they even provided official container images for a long time. There is https://snikket.org/ though which is an opinionated distribution of Prosody with easy to use containers. Sadly Snikket doesn’t play so well with Movim out of the box.

In general it is probably easier to start out with a rented VPS. You can move to your own server later on when you got the basics down. Since XMPP servers are quite lightweight they run fine on low end VPS that can be rented for as little as 1€/month.

At some point the benefit of extra RAM isn’t there anymore compared to what the CPU can actually run. With a CPU like that 8GB is probably sufficient and 16 would be merely nice to have for some additional caching.

I would go for the Wyse 5070 as a server. More RAM is good and the CPUs while somewhat slower are more power efficient.

The 4/5th gen Intel CPUs are the last gen that is really quite poor in power efficiency when mostly idling. 6/7gen made huge improvements in that regard.

Upgrading the storage should be possible quite easily.

For static sites, yes. To actually protect dynamic sites against AI crawlers, Cloudflare has to do much more than just caching.

And besides that, Cloudflare is a huge single point of failure and highly privacy invasive.