I’ve been running matrix on a €4/month ovh vps pretty successfully, resource usage generally isn’t that high. Element call even works, though I’ve vener tried with more than 3 people.
A ton of medium-size instances had to shutdown by the time they reached 100 users. Since it operates like a blockchain, all servers must sync all messages/attachments of the entire history to all other instances which is expensive (but also a metadata issue as so much gets synced back to Matrix.org, makes it impossible to delete one’s data, as well as say someone uploading something bad such as CP which is then synced to all servers & moderation tools don’t delete the files from other nodes). XMPP just gives you by default the last 20 messages (enough to get the current topic) & the chatroom hosts its own images/attachments instead of duplicating them to everyone.
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We’re talking about an instance for family and friends, not a public instance. I’m in some quite busy channels, with hundreds of users, and performance is fine. Many rooms are set to only show the history from when you join the room, which is the default.
The only metadata shared is what you set up. Just don’t set anything up, and all they’ll know when (and only when) you join a room on their homeserver, is your username. Which, considering you’re knowingly joining a room on a different server, I don’t really see as a problem.
What’s more accessible is how a toaster could host IRC or XMPP. You can count users in the tens of thousands instead of <100—meaning you have more resources to self-host more things. It really is an order of magnitude more & the clients are heavier too.
If anyone from Matrix.org joins your room, the entire history will be synced to their de facto centralized server instance. They may have needed to implement “sliding window” to help prevent the app always taking 10s of minutes to sync, but that data from the rooms inception will be synced over. Like a blockchain or replicating database, this is all by design. Other systems are just fine that you get the messages you need & not syncing back to the very beginning.
As I mentioned, syncing the whole room on join is not the default and in my experience not how (especially) larger rooms are set up.
Besides, yes of course matrix (synapse really) is heavier than xmpp, it has many more features. If you don’t need these features, there are much more lightweight home servers like tuwunnel.
Sliding sync is also not enabled by default (on element desktop at least), and syncing most certainly does not take many minutes. I’m not sure where you got your information regarding matrix, but most of it is incorrect.