You don't need to know most of those things to get started, in general you can just follow the setup instructions for the services you use. You do need your ow

You don't need to know most of those things to get started, in general you can just follow the setup instructions for the services you use. You do need your own homeserver, but for me I run a homeserver just for the bridges, and have my main account on a third-party homeserver. This way at least my native matrix chats (which are far more important to me) don't depend on my home server being online. I would subscribe to hosted bridges fairly quickly if they were a reasonable price. Maybe $1/month per service? Obviously there is risk here because you are trusting someone with access to your account but to me it is probably worth it. There is https://www.beeper.com/ https://www.beeper.com/ but you need to move your primary account to their service, which is just too much disruption and lock-in for me. TL;DR I agree, self-hosting is a bit much. I'd love to be able to pay for it though. I thought about hosting that service myself but I wouldn't want to run a service that is both against the dependencies' ToS and is playing cat-and-mouse with their attempts to shake you off. Too much excitement for too little reward.