In the wake of Discord’s recent announcement about age verification, Matrix recently came in for a lot of criticism by a lot of people who said it’s not a viable replacement. Andy works on Matrix for a living and Amolith is invested in the XMPP world so we get into secure messaging, trade-offs between security and user experience, federation, and more.
@edboythinks @latenightlinux i'm personally not very interested in stoat because it seems that federation is either not going to be implemented at all or going to be an afterthought. Right now if you ask someone "do you have Discord?" to exchange contact information you dont need to ask what server you're on or whatever, its just username, search, add. that's it.
Yes, federation is "hard" but it's doable and i personally think the "network" of anyone being able to talk to anyone should be in scope for these sorts of projects.
@theraspb @edboythinks @latenightlinux I also don't see any future for centralized/non-federated alternatives.
They can work for some communities, but generally people don't want to create a new account for every server they join.
Preaching to the choir here at Mastodon but federation is the way to go.
@theraspb @cos @latenightlinux it's interesting to me to see the sort of not-good-enough stance being taken by a lot of people looking for an alternative. when i left matrix as a platform, i left it because 'could not decrypt message' was basically a meme. the kind of fromsoft git gud approach that's common in the free software community won't fix some pain points, and it's a destructive force when seeking adoption. for users who are trying to make a switch to something less harmful, stoat is a familiar-looking alternative, and it works well once you actually get your account set up
to address federation directly, i'd love that too. what federated alternatives would you recommend that don't beat the user over the head with the crypto key stick?
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