It would be nice if these kinds of projects moved towards developing and using interoperable standards, so using something like XMPP seems like a good direction. It makes sense that people have different preferences and dealbreakers for software but it seems like it should be unnecessary for open source chat programs to be the subject of contentious arguments about which one people should use. The argument should be whether to keep using Discord etc. or switch to a unified open ecosystem, not Discord vs picking one of many separate small networks.