This. It's a shame that XMPP never really took off; even more so as a lot of people seem to be taking it as proof that no distributed chat system will ever tak

This. It's a shame that XMPP never really took off; even more so as a lot of people seem to be taking it as proof that no distributed chat system will ever take off. I think there are quite a lot of reasons end users would really like distributed chat, one of which is very much security. We need to learn why XMPP didn't take off and either a) fix it, or b) learn and move on. (Which is why I'm part of a team building http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/, check it out!) However, I don't necessarily think we're ever going to get to a world where everything is end-to-end encrypted. There will always be trade offs involved when using encryption, and sometimes the trade off aren't worth it (a stupid example being public group chats). It would be nice, however, if chat apps and protocols in general made it clearer what level of security is involved. Just like the average user is slowly getting to grips with HTTP vs HTTPS (thanks in part to the nice and simple padlock icon on most browsers), there's no reason that users can't be made aware of the security of a given conversation and medium. Facebook, for all its woes, is still easy/useful when trying to organize events, and I really don't care that much if they are spying on that. On the other hand I don't really use facebook messenger since I do care about those conversations. We need to empower average users to be able to make those same informed choices on who they trust with what.