@feld I'll bookmark this. I just read through the GitHub page. A lot more stuff than I figured ahead of time.
By comparison, on Debian, to get Prosody (XMPP) working you:
sudo apt update sudo apt install prosody -y>setup DNS records >open the ports >modify the Prosody config >pull certificates >import certificates
sudo prosodyctl check config
If everything looks good:
sudo systemctl enable prosody.service && sudo systemctl restart prosody.service
Done! You're online. Start issuing/registering accounts and to chat with people! It's that easy. Extremely straightforward. Prosody has an update? apt takes care of that with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y, just as it does with every other ordinary binary package. I have some transports and bridges setup that ship as Docker containers. Equally as straightforward and painless to get setup and running.
When I upgrade from Debian 12 to Debian 13, guess what? Everything is just going to work. If I have to move my service to a new machine I just copy the Prosody directory contents over and import the PostgreSQL database. So simple. So straightforward. So easy to manage. I like that.