https://snikket.org/ specifically for a small family server. Much lower maintenance and breakages than Matrix and thus less issues with the family.

+1 for xmpp

Probably less reliable for me as a techie. Every time I opened Jami, my firewall alerts would go off about a device on the network calling to China, Russia, and Vietnam lol. Resulted in it almost never connecting for me since my network just blocked way to many connections on it for outbound traffic.

Can you do an equivalent of matrix bridges on xmpp?