The people behind this are bitcoin shills.

Cool. I am currently using the OVH dyndns option and it is a bit annoying that you have to update each sub-domain individually and can’t just tell OVH to update all subdomains to the same new IP via a wildcard.

Is that something your script could do?

Also it seems like the OVH dyndns API currently only does either IPv4 or IPv6 but not both the same time.

Edit: Ah I see you plan to allow creating sub-domains through it. I guess that would indirectly solve my issue as well.

An the Syncserver still runs on Python2 with multiple known vulnerabilities.

There is a new Syncserver written in Rust, but it seems in continous half finished state or so.

Some WebDAV server, can be Nextcloud but actually something more lightweight is better.

Also a XMPP server is very nice to have. Even if you don’t have many contacts on it (yet), it works very well has a notification service and can even be extended to act as a Unified Push distributor.

Unless they have an active IT department that is already hosting various websites for them, it is probably better to show them some hosted offer like this: https://masto.host/

As for your questions:

1. Medium difficulty as far as self-hosting goes. Mastodon is a Ruby on Rails app.
2. Really depends on the number of users etc.
3. See no. 2. a few hundred $ or so.
4. As others have mentioned, let them make an account on an existing server first, it can be migrated to your own server later.

CEO of Nvidia. FU Nvidia!

Not really what you are asking for, but I found the combination of KaraDAV and Filestash to be a great alternative to Nextcloud, and much more stable for basic use.

As for Owncloud… I am skeptical of the company behind them ever since they split off into them and Nextcloud. Probably better to avoid, regardless of what you think of Nextcloud.

If you need it you will find it, and if you don’t, maybe it is unncessary clutter in your life that would be better to get rid off in a yard sale asap?

They probably used on of these federation “helper” scripts that just siphons up the entire fediverse. That is just a bad idea and results in a bloated database like they were complaining about.

Voice call implementation in Gajim is only waiting for an upstream improvement, it is already working otherwise. Sadly upstream seems slow in fixing this.

You can try this unofficial Windows version of Dino though, which supports calls: https://github.com/mxlgv/dino

Edit: and there is of course always Movim, which works fine in most browsers and supports 1:1 calls.

XMPP clients for Android are great, for iOS a bit less so. On Windows / Linux Gajim is probably the best option right now. JoinJabber.org has a good list of up to date clients (do not use Pidgin, it’s horrible and super outdated).

In general the main downside compared to Discord is the lack of voice-channels. 1:1 voice or video calls work great with the Android clients and group calls are partially supported in some desktop clients (that is currently very active field of development for XMPP clients).

Why wouldn’t XMPP work? It fulfills all your requirements and has nice modern apps, especially for mobile. Definitely better than Matrix.

The easiest to get started with it would be setting up a Snikket server (Prosody based, but pre-configured for small private groups).

If you connect via 10gbit PCIe extension cards it is often a question of how many PCIe channels the CPU has and if the mainboard you are using has these connected directly to the CPU or needs to pass them through the mainboard chipset which is much slower.

SimpleX is not suitable for larger group chats.

XMPP has a few quite popular privacy related public channels: https://search.jabber.network/search?q=privacy

(For those unaware: xmpp participant counts are actively connected users, not like Matrix or Discord that counts who ever joined the room years ago and never came back).

It would be ok, but a bit lonely, no?

Better look into Snikket.

maybe try: https://github.com/Fancy-Mumble/FancyMumbleV2

Installing Linux on most hardware became really easy maybe 5 years ago.

Gnome works quite well on a larger touch-screen. Edit: ah, Ubuntu should have that by default.

Many people have not used XMPP in years or never and go by hearsay of outdated information.

Matrix on the other hand had several million Euros of venture-capital to fund a marketing campaign.

A public Matrix server. Its just a never ending black-hole of ever increasing storage requirements and the software is too buggy to not become a maintenance hassle.

I do run a Synapse server for bridging purposes, so I am not just talking in theory.