Afaik yes.

The latest Lemmy release already allows moderators (and admins) to see who voted 🤷

Also included: XMPP account on the same address, but it would be nice if they would keep their Ejabberd a bit more up to date.

Yes in a local database, not a distributed one.

The main difference is that XMPP (like most other federated systems) is based on passing messages, so if a new server joins a chat, it gets send messages from that point onwards.

In Matrix that is different. When a new server joins a chat it exchanges the entire database for that chat, and for DAG consistency reasons this means all the metadata since the chat was first created, often years ago.

Matrix is not really a chat system, but rather a distributed database that pretends to be a chat system. As a result all servers participating in a room get a full copy of the room metadata all the way back to when the room was created, which is a serious privacy issue.

This is not a general problem of federated systems though, and XMPP for example basically only shares the metadata that other participating servers strictly need to function.

No, it still requires a phone number, but you can hide your phone numbers from other users now.

https://slidge.im/ with an XMPP server.

Well, I think a personalized message (maybe in the primary language of the instance) is more effective than some standard text thats everywhere.

I think most instance admins realize that there is also a need to support the devs, and a single place that advertises both and can get linked from the sidebar might also be more bring more donations to the devs.

Imho the best would be one that is customizable by the instance admins.

This is odd because I know a few mainland Chinese people that use XMPP without problems (and afaik without a VPN).

Sounds like your server got blocked for another reason?

Well, instead of leaking metadata to Signal, AWS, Cloudflare, Google/Apple and your ISP, like Signal does, RCS only leaks it to your ISP /s

You can easily redirect xmpp to port 443 which is not blocked by most firewalls. If you have problems with firewalls or public wifis your xmpp server is misconfigured.

The actual military grade (xmpp based) messengers implement security lables, meaning messages are tagged with the required security clearance and if you invite random people to a chat they can’t see the messages.

The server can swap to a modified JS that exfiltrates the e2ee key and thus allows the server owner to decrypt the messages, or in more advanced encryption schemes add additional keys without you knowing and achieve the same thing.

Yes you can juryrig something like that with cookies, but it is highly fragile and browser based e2ee is basically a scam anyways as the server serving the website can always swap out the javascript that decrypts the messages.

e2ee is not really compatible with what you want due to necessary key management, and once you drop that there are so many possible options for what you want that I don’t want to list them all here.

/me notes the commenter’s home instance and concludes there is no point in arguing about this very biased take…

Yes, in theory, but in praxis no because self-hosting the sync server alone still depends on the centralized auth server from Mozilla, and self-hosting that as well is possible but complicated. It’s sadly a mess, and you might be better off not using Firefox sync at all.

As for your other question, depends on the specific addon, but usually no.

The cheapest way would be to buy a domain from OVH and use their free offer of a 5gb single email address that is included with each domain.

You still need to log into their servers and thus provide them a lot of meta-data, like IP addresses, when and approximatly where you are using your browser, on how many devices etc.