The problem (exhibited all over this thread) is the conflation of protocols and apps. You misled yourself by overthinking it. This happened a lot a couple of ye

The problem (exhibited all over this thread) is the conflation of protocols and apps. You misled yourself by overthinking it. This happened a lot a couple of years ago when people fled Twitter for Mastodon, putting themselves off by assuming they needed to understand nuts and bolts irrelevant to their use case. Did you need to know how HTTP works to use a web browser? Of course not. Likewise, most people confused about Mastodon would be better served if they understood they just had to sign up on a website and start talking to people, same as anything else. In this case, if all you wanted was to try a chat app, you should’ve started at Element and you never needed to even know about Matrix. People using these things interchangeably has done enormous harm to the decentralisation movement.