The average user cna be expected to run quite a lot of things, actually; it’s just that the last decade of VC-funded services has trained them not to. Otherwise—AIM/ICQ/Pidgin, LAN game servers, Hamachi, DC++, a BitTorrent node ... Remember when Opera came with a web server? I doubt people have gotten so much stupider since then, even if computers have become much more complex and mainstream consumer software essentially troubleshooting-proof.
(Now if it’s an extra-special piece of software just to use your extra-special chat, then they’ll tell you to take a hike, true. They’ve got to actually want to get to the dancing bunnies[1] first.)
I think I'm reasonably tech savvy and at no time in my life I had a system I could trust to be 100% always-on.
No way you could expect average users to run their own service just so they don't miss messages.
Anyways it feels silly to require always-on service when history could just be part of the protocol.
I don’t actually disagree about chat logs. (An argument could be made that no-logging IRC was a good thing when it allowed volunteers to run genuinely large networks on the relatively wimpy contemporary machines they had access to, but it’s solely of historical relevance.)
I just think that the general argument that users are only capable of running server software with as much uptime as they care for (in the “easy” < 90% range) is unfair to users. They’re not dumb, it’s us the programmers who have made them behave as though they are and gave them little choice in it.
All that aside, a say 95- to 99-percent-online machine is pretty handy to have when you can code, you should try it if you don’t have one. The best such machine is one you don’t use interactively—an old desktop in a closet, an RPi with a USB HDD, hell, that old Eee PC you have laying around gathering dust works pretty well and even comes with builtin battery backup. You don’t—and shouldn’t—need to have one, but it’s liberating to be able to go “oh I’ll just throw that into urlwatch and have it poke me on Telegram” without a second thought. Now excuse me while I pacman -Syu && reboot my webserver :)
"The average user" is literally never a useful metric here.
Federation and federation type ideas should be enough; let's get (back?) to a place like cars mostly used to be. You should theoretically be able to know a friend who can fix your car if you don't want to be a mechanic, and the same for "computer stuff."
And for that matter, for "pretty much everything?"
Seems to me the simplicity of the bot is the biggest feature?