Sorry for the late response, I just saw this. I'm currently in a group chat with two other close friends. We were originally using GroupMe, but I convinced them

Sorry for the late response, I just saw this. I'm currently in a group chat with two other close friends. We were originally using GroupMe, but I convinced them to switch and register on my server (after I made sure that it was working reliably myself). At the moment, it's the only messaging platform that I use. I use regular texts to talk to everyone else. In my case, I don't need everyone to be invested into the network for it to be worth it. I'd say that around 95% of my daily communications are in the one Matrix group chat, so I've reduced my reliance on centralized services quite a bit. I've set a general long term goal for myself to gain more control over my own data. The first step was purchasing my own domain and migrating away from Gmail. This is just another small step.