Reflections: The ecosystem is moving
I&#x27;ll add my thoughts here, since I think a number of people will be disappointed in this post.<p>There are a number of competing goals when developing software that &quot;the whole world can&#x2F;will use&quot;. And it seems obvious to me that getting the whole world to use a secure, encrypted messenger like Signal (now, Whatsapp) is a noble goal. The obvious competing goal is federation, and the fact that we&#x27;ve failed at improving federated services (e-mail being the best&#x2F;most important example) is a problem.<p>Ultimately, Moxie&#x27;s arguments here hold a lot of sway for me. I think it sucks that constantly-improving services are impossible to address in a federated way, and he&#x27;s not really offering a solution to that. But instead he presents arguments I hadn&#x27;t thought about much, which is that perhaps non-federated services can be dramatically better than federated services in the short-term. And in the long term, perhaps we&#x27;ll move back to federated services; right now, the cost of changing services&#x2F;ecosystems is very low. So we don&#x27;t need to be as &#x27;doom-and-gloom&#x27; about the fact that Signal does not achieve <i>all</i> the competing goals, because it achieves a number of extremely important goals <i>right now</i>, and we can work on the other goals in the future.