There are plenty of easy to set up open source servers. I use a bunch of them. Here’s a few that come to mind:

• jellyseerr
• navidrome
• jswiki
• homeassistant
• docmost
• rustdesk

Those are all ones that only require three or fewer services in a Docker Compose stack. And the docker-compose.yml files are short and easy to understand.

There are plenty that are hard to set up, like:

• jellyfin
• nextcloud
• wordpress
• immich
• mastodon

I’ve installed all of these, and they were not as straightforward, but not too bad.

Matrix is the only one that has taken me more than a day. And I couldn’t even get everything working. Element Call still doesn’t work after trying to set it up for two days.

There is a lot of variance in how difficult these servers are to set up, but Matrix stands alone as the absolute hardest, most convoluted setup process I’ve ever experienced.