To me, self-hosted and federated (so you can self-host and others can self-host and it seamlessly works across instances) is the way of the future. There might be criticisms of xmpp or matrix, but to me the moment you're no longer looking at a single point of failure like with big tech services (or aspiring big tech services like this) you're much more secure because your data isn't in one centralized spot with everyone else's data to get picked up in one big hack.