@modpod I started matrix up because it seemed like it was relatively normie friendly and still offered the kinds of protections I was looking for wrt privacy. Most of my friends and family are not very tech savvy and I wanted something I could actually get them to use. Most of them are facebook users and their preferred channels of communication were/are captured networks that I don't want to contribute to. It's hard getting people to try new things, but matrix was surprisingly easy for the most part. Most people struggle with the "homeserver" aspect which I don't really get the problem with, but as long as I helped them log in they were good to go.

As far as security features go, I like matrix because it's federated (so I can manage my own server), uses end to end encryption (so even I can't read people's conversations) and provides tools for device verification which prevent someone from logging in as you somewhere else and being able to decrypt all of your conversation history. The intel agencies may have keys to all of the tls certificates, but they'd have a hard time getting the keys generated on a device they don't have direct access to. with e2ee you add another layer to the obfuscating onion of encryption.

There is a lot of overlap in the communications sphere of IT. I won't pretend to be an expert on which services provide the best protection or most features with fewest bugs, but I've been running a matrix server over 2 years at this point, and at least with my low user count it has been one of the lowest maintenance elements of my environment. I've heard others say they have scaling problems, but I've never really had any performance issues. Most of my users use it for direct chat with members of the same host, but I participate in several larger rooms and the server always keeps up.

My current matrix server is my second one. I just started it up late last year because I wasn't completely happy with decisions I had made in my last set up. The first thing I did this time was implement openId logins with a companion nextcloud server so my users can manage their own passwords. I didn't require email from any of my users which prevented them from being able to issue password reset requests if they forgot their passwords (which most of them did). This time I still haven't associated email addresses with matrix accounts, but nextcloud is hosted in my house and does have email capacity so my users can reset passwords from there.

I am planning on eventually standing up xmpp too and bridging it with matrix because I think there are a lot more people using xmpp and being able to reach them from matrix would be great. One thing that put me off from choosing xmpp initially was that I wasn't really sure which clients would be the easiest for people not in the tech industry to adopt. Matrix developed Element which for the most part works really well. The main thing I want to avoid is trying to tell my users to change anything ever again. Moving to the new server has been a right pain since the concept of homeserver is strange to many and my welcome email really only helps you get to Nextcloud not matrix. Also Google is maliciously flagging Nextcloud invitations as spam which I suspect is because they see it as a threat (they should). I did write up a welcome doc on nextcloud with links and an explanation of the environment that gets shared to people's dashboards, but I don't think anyone feels like reading haha.

Anyway... I have to go tend to the animals and prepare for work. Is 2x2chat.com yours? I may pop in later. There are also bridges for irc to matrix. One of the things I like about it is the ability to bridge it with other services (although I have done no such bridging to date). Sorry for the wall of text.