This is what frees a barrier to decentralization & actually owning one’s data. A few of my friends are now running their own single-user or small XMPP servers since it doesn’t use much in terms of resources or storage in comparison.
> The server setup felt like i needed to study a bunch of different doc
I believe this is what the Snikket project is trying to be. That said, XMPP servers are used for a lot more than just chat which is why most of them don’t have good defaults for merely chatting with friends since that isn’t the only or a generic enough use case (XMPP is behind Zoom, Jitsi, Fortnite, etc.).
> The clients were a little disappointing; again not terrible but not great
True. But I appreciate that there are many options & most features gracefully fallback even on TUI clients (like ‘reactions’ just being a message reply with a single emoji). If Element adds a feature (like polls), the other clients, the new feature just doesn’t show up. For a web client, the NLNet funding is really giving a boost to Movim as a reasonable alternative to Discord that is self-hostable & federated so users—taking back the meaning of “join my server” to literally mean someone’s server & without needing to create another account just to join that server.
As for the wish… this is what XMPP MUCs are—IRC with niceties like moderation, optional encryption, & file uploads. You said yourself the resources for servers is small & for your stated use case, most existing clients can handle being IRC+features while also not being centralized unlike IRC.