Meanwhile, I send emails to my friends regularly. We live in different timezones/countries/..., and coordinating times for chat is difficult, so we end up exchanging emails every few weeks. Often, these emails contain multiple kilobytes of text, with snipped context to remind me of what the last topic was, fairly long descriptions of events, etc.

Even for the people I share a house with, we found that email with a mailing list is the most effective way to post notifications to everyone, send reminders, etc.

I haven't come across a serious rival to email for those use cases.