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.

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.

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.

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).

Signal isn’t really open source the way Firefox or Linux is... you can audit the source code, but you can’t connect to the network with a modified version.

It’s nice that we can audit the source code. But it’s kind of pointless if you can’t modify it.

Matrix[1] has an encryption scheme based on the Signal double-ratchet (which was based on the OTR scheme) called Olm, and is completely federated with an open standard. So you can run your modified version, and be the only person who keep a history of your conversations (only the homeservers that participate in a conversation store the chat history).

Matrix also has features like bridges to other chat systems, as well as a plethora of clients thanks to being an open standard (the most popular is Riot).

[1]: https://matrix.org/

Signal is also effectively limited to smartphones due to the phone number requirement, making it even less free.

You can use Signal desktop - all you need is a phone to receive a confirmation text message, but that needn't be a smartphone.

Even that is too much to give to a chat application. In most cases a phone number is tied to a person, requiring that is pretty much requiring a full name.

I guess one could sign up with a Google Voice number or something, but the whole idea of requiring a phone number for anything not related to a phone is just ridiculous to me.

Even more ridiculous when Walmart almost wouldn't sell me tires because I didn't have a phone number. It took three different managers to figure out how to put in 000-000-0000.