Well, My family (parents, siblings, cousins, etc) members keep asking me to join them on various chat solutions (mainly Watsapp). I won't, and I've explained them why. I've also mentioned that specific alternatives might soon be mature enough to be easily usable by them. I've hesitated onboarding them on Signal, but we do not need to be that paranoid, and Signal can prove difficult in the way it handles media and free space on the device. Moreover, I will likely get a Linux-based phone (I have my pinephone braveheart next to me) soon as my daily driver, and I bet that Signal doesn't have a nice compatible client.

I'm eying Matrix, together with Fluffychat. I guess that when reactions will be there (for feature parity between clients, I don't want to miss some important information someone sent as a reaction like "I arrive at 8 tomorrow, can you pick me up at the train station" -> thumbs up) plus a few nitpicks, I'll be able to consider it ready.

What happens next? I am not sure. I would like to onboard them on a different homeserver, but I might tinker a bit too much with my personal server for this, plus it would be unavailable when moving around, etc. So I guess I should set up a cloud-hosted homeserver, but I am afraid of the costs, especially if they start joining busy rooms.

The best answer would be to use decentralized identities[1] on my HS for now, and migrate them over to a backup one in case of an outage, but we're not there yet. That's the main reason I keep an eye on p2p Matrix work with Dendrite (then, because it's more generally awesome).

[1]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/915