I use full-disk encryption on my Debian, and I honestly don’t see what’s wrong with entering your passphrase on boot.

This is also a drawback imo, as it locks out people with limited storage. Like me. I need this storage for media on my site. I don’t mind chats existing on several servers, but let people opt out of that at least.

It’s more akin to XMPP rather than IRC. From what I’ve seen, a Matrix server would be more resource-heavy than an XMPP one. Synapse one would probably not run on my weak machine at all, and Dendrite/Conduit are not feature-complete. And the primary reason I still haven’t been on Matrix is that I have very limited disk space on my VPS, and Matrix saves media from every chat its servers are on, and I still haven’t figured out how to opt out of that.