The number one thing I'm looking for in an open-source Skype alternative is persistent group chats with history (so when you sign in, you're still in the same group chats you were, and the history of messages that were sent in that chat while you were gone are sent to you). I'm baffled that this seemingly necessary thing is such a rare feature, and I'd be all over this project if it gets this.
We thought the exact same thing, so we're creating Matrix [1]! It supports all sorts of things, but especially public/private group chats with multiple device support. We're basically a team of people who use IRC all day, so we really do feel your pain :)
I know this might sound snarky, but this is the combination a lot of my peers and I use.
I'm wary of the "yet another proprietary new messenger", all of which are only compatible with themselves. I can not understand why none of them implement protocols all the messengers can agree upon like for example tent.io, remoteStorage or ZeroNet.
Distributed messaging is hard and a lot of people are giving it a try, leaving us with lots of different half baked walled gardens. Yes, I'm looking at you, threema, telegram and your friends...
