Unfortunately you only eliminate it by being your own server owner _and_ your recipient being their own server owner. Take a look at email: I might not want to use e2ee because I self-host, but the second I send an email to a friend hosted on gmail, Google gets all the content.

I think federation does have its place (for different reasons) but it unfortunately isn't enough for privacy.

What if I don't have and don't want my own server?

The nice thing about client-side/end-to-end security is that the service provider matters less.

Also, $2/month is $2 more than many people would be willing to pay for private messaging, and I can't message people on a network they're not on, no matter how much I pay.

And if you're privacy is worth less than $2/month, just use Telegram. It works way better than these messenges obsessed with privacy, precisely because it does not have encryption for most messages

That looks a lot like a server hosted by somebody else in a data center.

It's also way more hassle than almost all of my contacts would be willing to go through, and if only I self-host but they don't, it'll be Gmail all over. (Almost all emails go through Gmail because that's what at least one of the parties in an exchange is likely using.)

Point-to-point encryption is not enough for messaging in today's network topology.

> just use Telegram

No thanks, I'll continue using one actually spending some effort on not being able to read the messages their users send.

Fortunately most people in my country do. Ironically it's only a couple of people in my circle of friends worried about the privacy of said messenger switching to Telegram "because it's encrypted"...