All the alternatives to slack and discord seem to have some technological/philosophical axe to grind which is in opposition to "make it easy to setup and pleasa

All the alternatives to slack and discord seem to have some technological/philosophical axe to grind which is in opposition to "make it easy to setup and pleasant to use for the vast majority of users". If someone would just clone discord/slack and make it so people could stand up a server in minutes and manage it with near zero effort, and the UI/UX pretty much copied what users find familiar it would probably take off. Don't make it distributed, just apply enough cryptography to secure the client-server communication. Yeah, users will need to trust their admins and it won't be perfect security, most users don't need that. Make it easy to run fully public and indexed/searchable servers, make it similarly easy to run servers that weren't fully public and indexed and required logins and kept everything private, let the users decide instead of the developers. If your chat protocol cares too much about perfect forward security against hostile admins and attacks by the FBI while supporting a distributed protocol then you're likely producing something that is too complicated to use for 99% of the happy slack/discord users who don't care about that. The challenge for FOSS developers is to recognize that most people don't care about what they deeply care about and that they're not smart enough to solve the iron triangle of security. And that is when they're not self-sabotaging their product by looking at the way that e.g. slack and discord let you easily edit your comments and declaring yourself philosophically opposed to that.