> 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).