Having been on the Internet for decades, I’ve seen the growth of walled gardens and the associated problems. I hate it. Especially the messaging walled gardens.
Luckily there’s matrix, which is federated like email. But that doesn’t help if everyone just creates an account on the largest matrix.org home server.
So a while back I wrote a short guide on how to set up a matrix server for free. I won’t post it directly on the blog because I’ve had to update it. It seems to have been well received.