I’m speaking waaaaay far at the beginning so my mind is foggy as fuck, but there was something about configuration and messages not being sent if the host wasn’t correct, I think you had to configure the host or something, it put away a lot of normal users (with good reason) who only wanted to install an app and talk. Also it had nothing pretty about it, text only in a time when Telegram had gifs, was already adding stickers and shit, so it being complicated and having nothing pretty made it impossible for me to bring normal people into it.
I know it has changed a lot since then, but I stopped paying attention after that and with the time they got super buddy-buddy with meta for a while and how hostile their fanbase is against anything else… I dunno, it left a terrible impression so I rather keep searching for something else, right now I’m waiting for SimpleX to pretty-up so I can attempt to bring people over (it’s gonna take years since they first need to take it to a better state, but so far so good).