I agree but... I've tried self hosting Matrix, messy. I manage to get it running on my NixOS homeserver, it works, but Livekit is very limited, Coturn seems not that stable to traverse NAT occasionally for reasons I still don't know, video quality is a joke. XMPP? Well, it's even harder to self-host. Mumble is much easier (at least, for me) but lack the ability to call, and that's what I'm looking for.

I've also tried the plain old Asterisk with deskphones and softphone, a nice journey, but not something that could possibly succeed.

I line Nostr, but... So far it lack way to much clients to be used on scale, meaning the reasoning that a scrap of text is the center of our information/communication needs is very nice. But... Most clients are or buggy and limited or monsters not much less buggy. Long-form notes to makes personal blogs seems to be neglected, emails equivalent seems to be just an unfinished and abandoned experiment. The media part is still to be seen in realist usage terms.

So well... The problem of protocols is that lacking a decently feature complete simple app, easy to deploy from go install/pip install/cargo build without a gazillion of deps and different services, easy to package for distro the result is a messy ecosystem only some devs explore to explore, not really to use "in production" and there is so no option to really grow big.