Snikket is an attempt to solve the XMPP issues, or at least to reduce them, single all-in-one XMPP server distro and clients across platforms, and since it’s self-hosted no one should get their hands on your data (in normal circumstances).
That said, the saying goes “Perfect is the enemy of Good”. Just because a solution is not perfect doesn’t make it unusable, any of those options you mention full of problems are a helluva better than FB Messenger or plain SMS for example. Depending on your threat model they might be more than enough.
They do, one with them at the top
Have you seen an XMPP setup these days that doesn’t have installed all the extra stuff to allow encryption, voice and a lot of other bells and whistles?
Since around the time they announced the API changes, every image hosted on Reddit, when opened on a browser shows it embedded on a page on Reddit instead of just giving you the damn image, like it used to do. It pisses me off. Need to figure out a way to return it to the previous behavior and just give me the damn images i asked for, maybe something with the user agent (when you ask it to download it instead of displaying it, or when getting it with wget or the like, it DOSE give you the image, so the way is there somewhere).
This advice is not directly related to that, this is the same advice given by security-oriented organizations all over to compensate with people being people