On Privacy versus Freedom
My biggest problem with messaging applications as a whole is that I need
so many of them.  I have a few contacts who are reachable with Signal,
a few more who are reachable on Hangouts or whatever Google is calling its
latest thing, and a few more who are reachable with Skype.  That's three
programs, to communicate with three different subsets of people.
I'm sure if I used Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp, I'd have two more
subsets of people who are only reachable through those.<p>XMPP was supposed to solve all those problems when it came out in the early
2000s.  But then all the big tech companies who build "ecosystems" decided
to push their own applications, all incompatible with one another.  So
here we are again with this proliferation of programs that really only
do one thing: communication.  It's like the 90s / early 2000s with the
proliferation of instant messengers: ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and on and on and
on.
The players are different, but the game is still the same.
I suspect that twenty years from now, when the players have all changed
yet again, there will still be one reliable method of reaching me: IRC.<p>If the Googles and Whatsapps and Facebooks of the world had been around
in the early 90s, you'd have one email client from Facebook for mailing Joe
and Fred, an email client from Google for mailing Mary and Jane, and an
email client from Whatsapp for mailing Alice and Bob.  Thankfully, email
became entrenched before that could happen.<p>I want messaging to be like email, where I use one and exactly one program
to communicate with all of my contacts, regardless of what server they use.
People say that federation is more complicated than centralization.  I'm
sure that's true for developers, but in fact, federation can be vastly
simplifying for an end user.
I'm a fundamentally lazy person.  Having to learn all these different
messaging tools is frankly a waste of my time.
All I want is a federated protocol and an open system, be it Matrix, XMPP,
or something else.<p>As a final aside,
you know what else that bugs me?  The word "ecosystem".  I worked for
a big tech company for a while, and the only people I ever heard use that
word were people out to build a walled garden.