@alex and I know there are some things like revolt chat and the corpo groupware chats (like mattermost and rocketchat)

but in many cases you have weird licensing to deal with (like mm and rc) or AWFUL microservices architecture to deal with (revolt)

as well id like to have the server be a single binary (or something easy to deply standalone) with a relatively lightweight transport

federation might be a feature but I have mixed opinions on that. It adds a lot more to the plate when you have to verify messages/communication to and from external servers that adds some additional problems to deal with