I run https://gravitywell.xyz/
It should be okay to power from any phone that supports battery sharing.
The antenna that come with them are usually okay but eventually youll probably want to look into getting a better one. The small ones wont send far, but you should be able to see other far off nodes if they are high enough, they just probably wont see you.
I wasn’t aware of the ansible option when i set mine up. The thing with bridges for me is they don’t really organize into groups how i would have liked, since very chat, even 1:1 is really a “room”, it gets very cluttered, I did eventually figure out how to bridge entire discord guilds into groups automatically but then even with that there is no “don’t notify” option for the entire group you have to individually mute each channel. Setting up each bridge wasnt too hard for the ones that let you use QR logins, but I also ended up making a really weird mistake when trying to bridge XMPP and the error didn’t actually affect me until months later when a new upgrade for continuwuity make the issue i created into one that prevented the docker image from starting, and oh boy was that a fun lesson in how to manually edit sql database files using regex.
I could go on with little nit picks about things, but point being nothing was really an insurmountable roadblock for me, just little annoyances here and there that I’m personally willing to deal with but I can’t imagine many of the folks I regularly communicate with would be okay with.
That said though, Matrix is one of those rare projects that actually improves over time because they aren’t just developing it in order to cash out with some big VC or roll out some bullshit enshittification “premium” subscription once they get enough users. So I’m pretty hopeful we’ll eventually have something good enough to pry more users away from the silos of discord and meta services, some day.
Ive found matrix to be the least bad and most practical for text based comms. I was able to setup my server along with bridges that connect to discord, telegram, whatsappp, and meta, even signal too. Its far from perfect, the UI feels clunky no matter which i try and settinf up and managing bridges was an ordeal just for my accounts to get linked, but its functional enough that i dont need to keep discord or the other apps running separately.
For calling i still rely on signal directly. Ive used jitsi before but i dont really do voice calls very often.
Nothing is at a point i can recommend it over signal to non tech savvy people, althouth briar seems promising and meshtastic might eventually be something.
Im not sure if this is the same thing but i noticed a similar problem in vivaldi but its specific to youtube, or at least it doesnt affect peertube the same way. It seems to be based on the volume of the video, my guess its a “feature” that tries to normalize volume between different videos, but ive never figured out how to disable it.