I've been using it for years, so has my family and recently a group of some 60 friends with whom we communicated about a large party ont of my friend and me org

I've been using it for years, so has my family and recently a group of some 60 friends with whom we communicated about a large party ont of my friend and me organised. I made an invitation site with an instance of converse.js at the bottom of the page, pointed at an anonymous group on my (Prosody) server. We just mostly Conversations or one of its forks on Android - no fruit phones among us - and Converse.js on web, higher on the same server which hosts all our other services (mail, "cloud", media, etc.). Once installed and configured it is maintenance-free, lightweight and reliable. That is how you gain traction: by having people use it, realise the user experience is comparable or in some cases superior to that of other messaging systems - the party chat thing I mentioned above being a good example - and then realise they dont need to hand over their data to an ad broker (Google, Metafacebook, the fruit factory) or the government (all of them through some "chat control" type law).