Spin up an XMPP server, brother. The servers require a lot less resources & storage & the clients have a lot of diversity & on mobile consume the least power & data. These are great for decentralized chat & Movim or Libervia can be used to build communites with posts.

If you need coms for gaming, Mumble is a more than serviceable alternative with low-system requirements & low latency.

The old tech still works & is still being actively worked on. What we need is less churn in new, half-baked projects & more efforts into extending existing technology or building alternative modernized clients for those that want them atop these battle-tested technologies.