This is going to sound weird, but one of the things I don't really care about wrt to a discord replacement is the whole 'wide community' aspect. I want something cheap to host, can do calls of ~5-10 people, and can keep up with the text chats of ~30 users Max, and do some DMs.

Cost and quality is way more important to me than federation and networking. Easy onboarding would be nice but my friends are mostly sick of enshittification and we'd sacrifice a lot for chat sovereignty at a manageable hosting price.