[rascul]

It's not worth the effort for just one person. I need a service a majority of my friends can use. And they're not interested in something that to them is essentially the same as AIM from 20 years ago.

I really want to like Signal, but the phone number requirement just won't work for me. In the last five years, I've had a phone number for only about one year, and it's changed three times. I'm just not good with holding on to phone numbers. It's a large part of why I rarely communicate via phone calls or SMS.

I've tried Wire, but there were issues getting notifications on Android. If this has changed, maybe it can work for me now. I would prefer XMPP but I do like Wire.

[Boulth]

I wouldn't say XMPP did not change for 20 years, have you seen https://conversations.im/ ? Except voice / video (that I personally use rarely either way) I don't see any important modern feature missing.

[rascul]

Not saying it didn't change, that remark came from a non tech friend of mine, and it's hard for me to disagree without getting into boring technical stuff they're not interested in.

[Boulth]

I'm not talking about boring technical info but user visible changes like easy image / file sharing, "X has read until this point..." etc. They are small changes and already present in proprietary solutions but for users this is a visible change.

I put my entire family on a self hosted server and for them it looks like any other modern messenger. (no voice video calls yep).