I have an unfederated XMPP server (running Prosody), family’s using Conversations (Android) & Dino (Linux) with it. We can chat, send images, do voice & video calls. Has been working fine & reliably for the past ~6 years or so. Took about 1.5 minutes for them to get used to the clients.
I’m slowly opening it up for friends too, so friends, neighbours, classmates, etc can chat with us too. It’s going great so far, no complaints.
We pay more for ingress of logs than service uptime
I cried on this part, it hit home so hard. My homelab went down a couple of months ago, when Chinese LLM scrapers hit me with a wave of a few thousand requests per second. It didn’t go down because my services couldn’t serve a few k requests/second - they could, without batting an eye. However, every request also produced a log, which was sent over to my VictoriaLogs, behind a WireGuard tunnel, running on an overloaded 2014-era Mac Mini. VictoriaLogs could kind of maybe handle it, but the amount of traffic on the WireGuard tunnel saturated my connection at home, which meant that the fronting VPS started to buffer them, and that cascaded into disaster.
Yeah, setting the server up was a bit of an adventure. But I did that once, and it’s been serving us well since. My users saw none of that.