This is not true. Data will only be sent to your homeserver if a user on your homeserver joins a room on another server. And only the data for that room is sent, not the whole network. The room data only contains all state changes, and a small amount of recent messages. The amount of state changes is the biggest problem.

Matrix protocol does have a giant problem regarding spam joins though, which make a complete instance basically unusable. Last time I talked with people related to the protocol they didn’t want to or know how to fix it, because the need to verify all room state changes.

Using an old Netgear Readynas R102 with 4.5 TB of usable storage in RAID 0.

I used to run all kinds of services on the nas itself via the ssh access, but I’ve since moved those to separate raspberry pis. The pis use the nas as a networked storage.

I run a webserver, music server, matrix server and torrent client seeding ubuntu images.

I want to make a storage cluster using Ceph in the future, but I’ve not found any suitable small computers that I could use with that.