Good to hear. I was hoping that would be the case, and obviously it's not bothering me enough to do more than a cursory google search.

I’ve been running my own homeserver for over a year now. As long as I’m not joined to the “giant” rooms like #matrix:matrix.org and #riot:matrix.org, my user’s messages send instantly. Definitely recommend running your own server if you can manage it

Excellent. I can and will soon. That's actually how I started out, but had some other performance issues. After a bit of googling I realized I'd need to read a bit more before running my own copy of synapse (was also uneasy about the security implications of all the federation stuff and want to make sure my server is hardened enough before I open those ports).