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+1 though to his credit he does caveat it a bit and states it’s still worth talking about the issues given the technical audience. I do think Moxie is right th

+1 though to his credit he does caveat it a bit and states it’s still worth talking about the issues given the technical audience. I do think Moxie is right though and the talk is wrong on the core issue which is federation doesn’t work as well unless you really boil the ocean to do it (urbit) and even that still has to prove itself. Signal is really good at doing what it does well and I’m grateful for that. Matrix is cool, but my family/friends will never use it (and element still sucked last I checked, especially to deal with encryption). Signal is easy to use, extremely secure, and I can actually use it with less technical people I care about. Like you said - these are major wins among an ocean of failure from technologists who have for years complained while failing to ship a solution with the right tradeoffs (normal) people would actually use. I don’t find his other arguments very convincing either.

NoGravitas 4y ago
> I do think Moxie is right though and the talk is wrong on the core issue which is federation doesn’t work as well unless you really boil the ocean to do it (urbit) and even that still has to prove itself. I'm not so sure about that. I feel like Matrix has pretty much solved the problems with federation, E2EE, and multi-device usage. I typically have Matrix clients running on three devices, talking to my self-hosted homeserver, with encrypted chats with people on different homeservers, and it's been... at least a year?... since I had any issues with encrypted messages. It's been really good at disproving Moxie's assertion that you have to have centralization to evolve a protocol, too. The introduction of Spaces (like Discord servers) was really smooth and backward-compatible. There are features it lacks that I miss (stickers, sending multiple images in one message), but they're not essential. I do still also use Signal with less technical people, and I think Signal has been very successful at making adoption very easy, but with serious trade-offs for anyone not on the happy path (changing devices is a nightmare, it's too easy to lose chat history, multi-device is a trainwreck).

NoGravitas 4y ago

> I do think Moxie is right though and the talk is wrong on the core issue which is federation doesn’t work as well unless you really boil the ocean to do it (urbit) and even that still has to prove itself. I'm not so sure about that. I feel like Matrix has pretty much solved the problems with federation, E2EE, and multi-device usage. I typically have Matrix clients running on three devices, talking to my self-hosted homeserver, with encrypted chats with people on different homeservers, and it's been... at least a year?... since I had any issues with encrypted messages. It's been really good at disproving Moxie's assertion that you have to have centralization to evolve a protocol, too. The introduction of Spaces (like Discord servers) was really smooth and backward-compatible. There are features it lacks that I miss (stickers, sending multiple images in one message), but they're not essential. I do still also use Signal with less technical people, and I think Signal has been very successful at making adoption very easy, but with serious trade-offs for anyone not on the happy path (changing devices is a nightmare, it's too easy to lose chat history, multi-device is a trainwreck).