My experience with Matrix is that the federation itself is a deal breaker. I have a pretty beefy server and good connection which was getting ddosed by running Matrix and timing out on so many requests for avatars/profiles etc. Maybe I did something wrong, but the whole experience rendered me quite skeptical to the viability of it as a federated chat.

That said I’ve had nothing but good experiences using it with big servers set up by pros.

Right, and picking an instance is kinda same guidelines as any fediverse. Find something focused on your main interest of decent size and you’ll be able to get things from most other places too?

Just out of curiosity, as a person who doesn’t make any videos myself and don’t know anyone who does, is there any use to hosting my own peertube instance? Mostly curious because it seems quite popular to self-host so there might be some killer feature I’m overlooking.