I kind of don't want to bother replying to your random claims, but I'll bite a little:
That post is now five years old, and almost completely wrong or outdated. That first paragraph is also absurd fearmongering - and both technically impossible for matrix and against Element's buisiness interests. I develop my own homeserver software, and it's recently become more popular than dendrite. I use a client developed by a friend that seems like it has more features than element (although it's less user friendly).
For spam protection, we use tools like meowlnir or draupnir with the cooperation of the homeserver to allow completely blocking spam invites - so if a matrix ID goes evil you can leave the room you have with them and add them to a ban list, and you can subscribe to a variety of other ban lists to ban things in advance
Yeah, saml is a nightmare! Never make me touch saml, please 🥺
In Continuwuity, the first user created is the admin user - so creating a user using either a registration token, or an admin command via --exec, the emergency password, the interactive console, etc would work.
Hi there, Continuwuity developer here - This seems like an awesome idea! You might also want to see if you can use/extend the new oauth specification from MAS to create a more 'Log in with Social' like experience, too, although only Synapse supports that right now
This is like the opposite of what you want to do for complex software - don't add more abstraction, or you won't know what to do when stuff goes wrong!
I'm pretty much sure only free option for finding out what other people search for is Google Trends. It's very valuable data that is hard to get, so the companies that offer it charge quite a lot for it.
Here are some of the things I self host that I haven't seen mentioned:
Continuwuity is a chat server that talks Matrix, so you can join the chat rooms of a lot of open source projects or make end to end encrypted private chats
Forgejo is a self-hosted code forge (github alternative) - very useful
FreshRSS is a good one if you like to follow blogs, newsletters or pretty much anything 'news'
Grafana plus VictoriaMetrics and/or Quickwit is very useful for keeping track of the health of all your services
Homepage is a... homepage for all your services
Stalwart gives you a mail server. Set it up for any other projects that need to send mail, or as a backup for your emails, contacts or calendars - it's the easiest way to set that up self hosted. Making it suitable as your main email may need more effort (delivery).
Related to Continuwuity / matrix, you can set up the Mautrix collection of bridges, which let you bridge Discord, WhatsApp, IRC, telegram, and more into your matrix account or chats seamlessly.
LMS (lightweight Media Server, not to be confused with Logitech Media Server) is an alternative to Navidrome that I find works better with my library tagging and ListenBrainz
Speakr - audio transcription with diarisation. Very useful if you like to record meetings.
My personal selfhosting repo is just about 2 years old with 750 commits now, and probably more than 60 containers running. It's not because of one great effort or design or anything, just setting up a service or two when I find it interesting every few weeks, and trying to make all my setup consistent. Almost everything is deployed as a container run by Podman quadlets, files mounted in /var/opt, config etc copied into place by an ansible script. But not everything, sometimes getting it working was easier without the sensible or I needed to do some funny networking.
TLDR: Coming back again later, and making that easier.
I kind of don't want to bother replying to your random claims, but I'll bite a little:
That post is now five years old, and almost completely wrong or outdated. That first paragraph is also absurd fearmongering - and both technically impossible for matrix and against Element's buisiness interests. I develop my own homeserver software, and it's recently become more popular than dendrite. I use a client developed by a friend that seems like it has more features than element (although it's less user friendly).
Being an official standard isn't working out particularly well for ActivityPub.