Lot of sales for 4th of july (and ongoing ones) where you can pay $10-$14 for a YEAR of a small cheap VPS. Usually only has 1GB of memory, but that’s plenty to play around with and learn. If nothing else, a good cheap ipv4 you can use for some port forwarding. There are lots of options, but I’ve used racknerd and ethernetservers which have been fine.
I have my own server at home, but I bought two small ones to start learning Ansible with in a risk free way. Eventually plan to redo my main server with a complete Ansible setup, really want to hop on that “infrastructure as code” train.
Snikket (which is run by a Prosody dev) is aiming to be the “one app” of XMPP. Their Android version is, IIRC, rebranded Conversations. Not sure on iOS/macOS but I think they have something there as well. And of course their server software is Prosody with a few extra plugins configured by default. All FOSS
I can confirm that the Snikket iOS app is rebranded Siskin :). Not sure about MacOS.
I’m really excited about Snikket, though. I hope it succeeds :).