I moved to xmpp only for instant messaging over a year ago. At first it was met with great resistance by my contacts, but by now my family and almost every relevant friend installed conversations on their smartphone. I helped with the setup and provide them with access to my personal server. The growing public knowledge about privacy violations of the big services has made it very easy for others to grasp the reasoning behind my preference for decentralized services.

I actually thought about using matrix, but it apparently "modern" means "resource hungry". My xmpp instance server runs on a small server with 2GiB Ram, with more than 1.5GiB being unused.