I tried Conversations but I couldn't for the life of me get message history to work. There's just so much stuff you have to do when it comes to XMPP to get things working. Perhaps if I used someone else's server it wouldn't be a problem but I'd prefer not to do that.
I agree that it's a bit hard to get setup if you're dead set on running your own server, but that will be the case with anything (although Prosody and Ejabberd et al could have better defaults for the majority of people who probably just want to throw up a server and be done). The nice thing about XMPP is that if you don't want to run your own server, you're spoiled for choice. The network is significantly bigger than any of the other protocols I know of [citation needed].
I mentioned this a bit below but this wasn't the case with Matrix. Setting up a homeserver took me about half an hour and gave me everything out of the box. Setting up Prosody took me days and gave me nothing but trouble.
There are a lot of XMPP servers around but I really want my own so that I can store plaintext chat logs on the server.
If you're using conversations go into the drop down menu, choose Accounts, click on the account you're using and then in its drop down / context menu (what do you call the hamburger menu on Android?) choose "Archiving preferences". Although it's deliberately buried so that you don't mess with it, so I'm not sure how it would have been accidentally turned off, so maybe whatever's happening with your server is unrelated.
