Discord/Matrix bridging works well for me! I wrote up a guide here: https://boilingsteam.com/how-to-bridge-discord-in-matrix/

Setting up a matrix server on an ec2 took a few evenings (lots of reading docs). Then, setting up discord was supposed to be more configuration…

Element has hosted instances for 10$/month and discord bridges for 20$/month?

Does anyone else run hosted matrix instances with bridges? I might pay 10$/month for that.

Or, are there AMI instances for that? I couldn’t find any.

I found the Ansible playbook [1] on GitHub extremely easy to use. As long as you know how to configure DNS records and firewalls, the rest is taken care of. This is what I use today to manage my Synapse server.

Also Oracle Cloud offers free ARM instances with 4 CPU cores and 24 GB of RAM, more than enough to run a very speedy Synapse server.

[1]: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

It's also important to read the docs for that ansible playbook, know what certbot does, setup the nginx proxy accordingly or remove the nginx proxy. Maybe I should have done this on a mint machine.

I wish there was a good Discord:Matrix bridge but I've never been able to get anything useful working nor does it seem like Discord will ever allow something like that on their platform.

Except many servers are unreliable and overloaded. Plus, Discord audio just works and you don't have to worry about your chats randomly disappearing.