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Snikket makes it quite easy, but the extra complexity of hosting from home is probably better avoided for total beginners.

Yes, Matrix is a bit ahead with SFU calls (after depending on Jitsi Meet for a long time, which uses xmpp under the hood). But for most usecases it doesn't matter so much. On a modern internet connection a SFU basically only starts being useful in calls with ten or more participants. For corporate board meeting calls maybe, but your family call is also fine without.

There is no way sending free healthcare to foreign countries might backfire with the local population in the US, right?

This might be interestng for some xmpp webclients, but there is also the work in progress: https://github.com/conversejs/libomemo.js

For now voice and video calls in xmpp only lightly touch the server and are mostly p2p. This comes with some scaling issues but for small groups of around 5 people it works fine.

Movim is a bit special, for other clients it doesn't matter much.

Any place you can bring a shipping container to can also be served by a water tanker truck capable of delivering 40,000 liters per trip.

If this was something you could fit on an offroad pickup truck, I might see some application in very remote drought stuck regions, but most of the time such regions have people with livelihoods depending on lifestock that also needs water, so 1000 liters a day is never going to cut it for them.

Movim specifically works a bit better with ejabberd, who also provide easy to use containers.

Prosody is more of a Lego set to build your own server, so I don't think they even provided official container images for a long time. There is https://snikket.org/ though which is an opinionated distribution of Prosody with easy to use containers. Sadly Snikket doesn't play so well with Movim out of the box.

In general it is probably easier to start out with a rented VPS. You can move to your own server later on when you got the basics down. Since XMPP servers are quite lightweight they run fine on low end VPS that can be rented for as little as 1€/month.

What would you need apps for? PWAs and pinned browser tabs work just the same. And also you can just use any other xmpp app with your Movim account.

Due to the architecture of Movim with parts of it running on the server a "proper" app wouldn't make much sense. On the plus side this also means it is very lightweight in the browser, unlike JS heavy browser apps or Electron wrappers.

But since Movim is fully XMPP standard compliant, you can use a native XMPP Android app like Monocles Chat with the same account and have most features included in it as well.

You would be surprised how performant php7 and later has gotten 🤷

1000 liters per day is very little...

a fun built-in paint program to draw stuff into the chat

The main purpose is actually to easily annotate image uploads 😅