Most people aren’t willing to drive 12+ hour days

I like my roadtrip vacations. OTOH you can also rent for your yearly holiday, but this can get pretty expensive quickly.

How?

There are two main implementations. I use someone else’s server, but really like responsiveness. Matrix is lagging (heh) in this regard.

Yeah Matrix is cursed. They have python main server and a graveyard of alrernate implementations. XMPP is rock solid