This is not true. People, don't let this FUD scare you.
My home server has been running for more than a year, was easy to setup (reading documentation took the most time) and takes little maintenance. Just apt update && apt upgrade.
Edit: and even if reading the documentation takes you 'days of work', you can follow a video of the server being setup in 30 minutes, including a jitsi instance for video conferencing: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/04/06/running-your-own-secure-c...
- buy a VM
- buy a domain
- configure DNS
- apt-get install
- fiddle with SSL certificates
- debug out a memory leak bug
- ask upstream and be told to use an unstable alpha release
- implement a workaround
- start investigating bridges for IRC, Slack, Telegram
- give up
In 2020 we should expect something like Briar:
- install Briar on your ws / phone. There is are no servers. Done.
It is not representative though. You do need a server and a domain name, but that isn't out of place when hosting internet based services like a chat server.
That avoids most of the need for domain, DNS configuration, SSL and SSL certificates.
A centralized chat server e.g. IRC runs on a raspberry.
Briar, as I said, runs without servers and provides also blogs and forums.
And yet setting a full Matrix stack requires days of work and endless maintenance.
I'd rather use Briar or even Signal.