Open protocols is the way. Then if a client starts acting sketchy or bloaty, you can ditch it for a better one. Plus, an open protocol changes the risk calculu

Open protocols is the way. Then if a client starts acting sketchy or bloaty, you can ditch it for a better one. Plus, an open protocol changes the risk calculus for the group that manages the client implementation, in a way that would prevent situations like this one. However, open protocols beget federation, so I don't think you're at odds with the above poster. Email, DNS, etc are all open protocols with federation built-in, but we trade away some centralization of servers (GMail, Cloudflare, etc) in exchange for nice things (DoS protection, spam filtering, etc). In the worst case, where a server starts acting scammy (like embedding ads in your email) or tries to diverge from the protocol, you can always go back to hosting it yourself, or paying a small and trusted shop to host it for you. In the arena where Signal is competing, Matrix [1] is probably our best bet. (Assuming irc is too barebones for your needs, in 2021). It has also supported end-to-end encryption for some time now [2]. [1]: https://matrix.org/docs/spec/ https://matrix.org/docs/spec/ [2]: https://matrix.org/faq/#which-matrix-clients-support-e2e https://matrix.org/faq/#which-matrix-clients-support-e2e