> There's a reason that everyone using Conversations essentially has to use a server that is maintained by the developers.

That is completely untrue. First of all there are public servers that have exactly the same feature set like jabber.at second of all we are running ejabberd on conversations.im. ejabberd is open source can be run by anyone. You just have to do it. Granted the list of public servers with a full feature set is not as long as we'd like. But the best way of changing this is to run one yourself.