[dividuum]

> The major upside (for me) to federated systems is simple: choice. Choice over the client you use. Choice over the servers you use. Choice. For something so fundamental as how we communicate over the internet that's incredibly important. I want to be able to use the app I want without having to figure out if the other person is using the same app, and i don't want to have to have 10 different apps on my phone just to keep in touch with everyone.

Isn't that exactly the point of the post? If you have lots of choices, what you end up using depends on the intersection of features that your client and the client of the person you communicate with can handle. Which usually ends up advancing slowly, if at all. I'm still a user of XMPP and maybe there is a way to do video chats. But I don't bother trying to set that up as I don't expect it to ever work reliably: I just checked five random contacts and everyone of them uses a different jabber client. So what I end up doing is using XMPP for text chat on my desktop machine and skype/hangout if I need video conferencing.

Same with email. Apart from a bunch of anti spam headers, emails I receive basically look the same they did 10 or 20 years ago. Trying to implement accessible end-to-end crypto probably won't happen for the same reasons.

[heavenlyhash]

And yet the Matrix team is doing it remarkably well.

I've been a user of Matrix for going on a year now, and they continue to roll out updates and improvements, over ALL of their platforms -- I use the android, iPad, and desktop/web apps every single day. They're also a federated service. Several of my friends run their own servers.

Some days there's a little bar across the top of my page on the desktop client that says "refresh to update your experience!" and I do. My experience updates. Everything continues to work.

Matrix has done such a good job making it easy to roll out updates that people... do.

And I can't tell you how thrilled I am to be living in a federated world. You just can't compare this to e.g. Slack. I can get friends from all backgrounds on the same system because it's so open.

The Matrix team is proof by example that federation and rapid forward motion is possible.

[pseudalopex]

There’s middle ground between the extremely loose coordination of XMPP and one client, one server, one network.

Open Whisper Systems pays people to work on Signal. A major reason XMPP video chat never took off is that no popular Windows client supported it. What if the XMPP Software Foundation had funded that work?