I've used XMPP ~2 years ago and also set up my own server (prosody), it was a really good experience. Lightweight, Fast, reasonably secure way to chat with some

I've used XMPP ~2 years ago and also set up my own server (prosody), it was a really good experience. Lightweight, Fast, reasonably secure way to chat with some friends. But I switched to Matrix a year later, not because I liked Matrix more, but because there was no one using XMPP besides me and some friends, everyone else (foss projects and maintainers) was on Matrix. I really would love to use XMPP again, as prosody was a brease to set up, never made problems and was really lightweight compute and storage wise. My Matrix homeserver (Synapse) uses 10x to 500x more RAM and CPU ( + the added CPU and RAM of my postgres istance) than prosody did, and its database is at least 10GB now (prosody used couple of MBs). Receiving and Sending via XMPP was also way faster than Matrix and large rooms on XMPP did not take 60+ seconds to load after you didn't check for a while.