And it was hard to explain to friends/family how to set it up.

That's why I gave up on self hosting it. I can sit here and mess around with recovery keys and verification and whatever else, but if the people that would use it with me can't just sign up and chat, then I've got no one to talk to. They don't care much about privacy, which I'm finding is most people.

Yea Synapse is very resource hungry. Element built a much more performative enterprise server implementation, but though it's open source it comes with a proprietary license, which kind of defeats the point when it comes to digital sovereignty in the public sector. From what I heard they unfortunately concluded that this is the only way to prevent organizations from freeriding, but it still sucks for the ecosystem. I'm working on one of the larger European Matrix public sector projects and we've been trying to mobilize funds for upstream contributions for some time, but it's not easy to convince the policy and finance people to approve sustainable contributions to an open source ecosystem; they want to see procurements where it's 100% clear what you get for your money. Also, public sector communication use cases frequently have high user count, low message volume and a high number of federated instances; so the current Synapse implementation has mostly been workable as you can feasibly scale horizontally. So there is currently not really that much financial incentive and pressure from the public sector to improve the efficiency of Synapse.

Now for comparison's sake, try snikket, or even barebones ejabberd on a (featuresfriendliness) vs (admin overheadserver resources) basis. Mix in some https://mov.im/ if you must.

Were you running Synapse?