One of my first impressions when I moved from vim to emacs was that emacs lacked sensible defaults. A lot of things that "just worked" in vim had to be configured in emacs. But, now that I am comfortable with elisp, I don't really know if the defaults are that important. Perhaps emacs has a different philosophy that takes getting used to. Perhaps the lack of good defaults is a price for all that configurability and customizability.
Yes, I need to report bugs in Tox and Ring. Like I said, I need to look at them more closely.
About XMPP: I already run my own XMPP server on my own infrastructure on a home Internet connection. I am just frustrated by the downtime associated with power cuts and other reasons. I don't see running servers on VPSs as being very much better than using centralized services. That is why I go to the trouble of running my own infrastructure.
I do use XMPP, but I'm not very happy with the need to maintain a server. When last I checked, Tox was too buggy. I have to try it again. Ring shows promise, but I'm not able to get it running without all its bundled libraries. Seriously, packaging Ring is a pain.
Goddammit. Life is getting difficult without "Viber" and "WhatsApp". Even government offices and officers offer to communicate through them, and send details and stuff.... #1984
You could contribute to any of the many free software projects that are trying to develop federated or P2P versions of common centralized services. Or, you can contribute to projects such as Freedombox or Freedombone which are trying to make running home servers easier. @bob runs the Freedombone project. Maybe, you can talk to him. Then, there are community mesh network projects such as the Commotion project. There is no end to the work that needs to be done to build a new better Internet. It really depends on what your specific interests are. I like programming. So, I mostly write and contribute to free software. But, there is a lot of advocacy and awareness work that needs to be done too.
@bob @aadilayub Last year, at a free software conference, I met the people who had set up that Freedombox in India. I couldn't get very much actual on the ground details from them. They said they had collaborated with some local ISP to set up that Freedombox. They apparently didn't want to invite sabotage by being perceived as a threat to the local ISP.