I kept looking. Stumbled upon Phoenix chat but could never get it to work, and the same with Element/Matrix. I never got the motivation to build it myself, but I might have attempted eventually.

It's the same with Bitcoin. I thought that money needed to be decentralized. I saw how credit card processors were the always middle man who would basically have half the money after just 20-30 transactions, and I thought to myself "psshhh! It's just a ledger! I can do better than that!" Then I found bitcoin and was like "dang! He beat me to it..."