[happymellon]

I agree, I dislike sharing any data with Facebook/WhatsApp but I shouldn't require children to spend $1000 to be allowed to communicate.

XMPP would be preferred, but isn't quite as simple as iMessage/WhatsApp at the moment, and Matrix isn't the same. I do see that some of the XMPP clients are getting pretty slick and I could probably move the family to something like that soon enough.

[jssfr]

You may or may not like https://snikket.org.

It's a bunch of XMPP software (Conversations, Siskin, Prosody), with minor patches, under a common branding (the Snikket parrot), plus a web portal.

It's aimed at the friends&family use case, with an easy invitation-based onboarding workflow. You can either self-host a Snikket Server (= Prosody + TURN + certificate automation) or sign up for the hosted beta (which is either bring-your-own-domain or a domain under snikket.chat).

Note that snikket.org is not, by itself, an XMPP service where you can just sign up. You either need to run your own instance, or you need to sign up for hosting.

[happymellon]

I will give it a go, cheers

[toastal]

I self-hosted ejabberd on an 2014 smartphone using postmarketOS last weekend. The defaults were almost all good enough and the only tricky part was setting up all the networking bits (getting my domain names hooked up to nameservers, dynamic DNS, Nginx proxy on the router to get ACME certs from the built-in ejabberd module) because these aren't thing I work with on the regular. Performance for users countable on one hand hasn't been an issue. Self-hosting Synapse for Matrix on an at-home device... good luck.