$10/mo is steeper than I like for a chat app, but this is so huge to just roll everything into one place, and I like that it's OSS, so I'm happy to pitch in and support the devs even if I'm capable of self-hosting the backend.
Classic HN comment.
Yeah, $10/mo, + the time needed to setup everything + the time to maintain it + the security holes to patch yourself + the downtime because the instance rebooted for some reasons + the monitoring of the service + all the time wasted because you could have simply lived your life and paid the reasonable fees for the service in the first place.
Not at all, prosody and ejabberd both work flawlessly without all of that nonsense. If it's a shitty piece of software maybe, but then why even bother using it in the first place?