The closer you move to the user, the more the threat of creepy buddy watching over metadata of people they know grows.

actually i don't follow that argument. it is more likely that my data gets caught up with someone accessing a larger server than my own server. if someone targets my own server they may as well target all my messaging clients and get all the data from there.

The thing is, if there's three users that know each other, using one server run by one of the three, then by definition there is one person with access to metadata of the 1:1 conversation between the two other users. If you are the one running the server, then your buddies are taking the risk that you're the creepy buddy.

The proper way to address this is with p2p messaging, like Cwtch, where each user is running server for their own account. Cwtch also experimentally supports caching ciphertexts on a server that's hosting the group chats that all members will have access to anyway, so there's no peer metadata to eavesdrop on.