Your mileage may vary, as it’s a project that doesn’t look to be actively worked on anymore, but selfhosted-gateway is a simple wireguard docker setup that’s relatively easy to set up. It spins up the relevant proxies and tunnel, Doesn’t cost anything, nor is there any signups etc… all you need is a VPS, a domain name and a home machine.
Someone mentioned commet as a discord like matrix client the other day. I’ve trialled it using my matrix setup, and it looks and feels very clean, I definitely prefer it to element.
Unfortunately as the tale always goes, it’s not quite on par with element in features (it claims to have RTC support using livekit, but I couldn’t find the group call option), but it’s definitely one of the more interesting clients to come about recently. I really like the separation of spaces and personal chats, and the multiple accounts feature is useful from a sysadmin perspective.
Once they manage voice channels with RTC, I think matrix will finally have its discord alternative that could see some adoption with everyday users.
I installed it locally using the deb package on their GitHub. They also have apks and I believe a flatpak too (don’t quote me on that though).
The android APK is a little funky (I kept getting the notification “you’ve been invited to a room” for every message I’d receive) so I switched back to using element x for the time being, but commet is now my go to client for my laptop, as I don’t use that machine for VC anyway.
You’re right in the sense that none of it is hosted on app repositories though; they’ve still got some ways to go on that front.