I don’t like it at least because it’s Electron. I had better experiences with Nheko and Cinny.

My concern is that they’d demand not just profit, but growth. But I wonder if they’d be able to go on by charging for commercial use - hosting servers, tech support, etc

I didn’t personally have problems with reliability (same as for XMPP, Matrix however has broken for me a few times). As for multiple devices - I just use two, with identical names and profile pictures, one on laptop and one on phone.

XMPP

a) yes, exactly this and b) where tf did you take “gambling” here?

Well, technically, they could MITM the traffic similarly to how they did to jabber . ru. But a) there are mitigations for this and b) more importantly - they would need to bother. No one’s going to bother doing it to a random family server that has attracted no previous attention.

I don’t think any ban on such selfhostable servers is enforceable at all.

Yeah, but I’d say separating your identities you use for different things is a very basic measure a lot of people would want to use.

There is no option to set a different handle and avatar for different groups of people tho, and I don’t remember if the username shows if you get discovered by number. Also, this was just an example - usually you’d have more than two groups you’d want to isolate.

That is the problem of getting another person to change something… A very valid problem but not inherent to decentralization.

But that assumes the Signal identity is the same as your IRL identity. Makes not just anonymity (which is often important for safety just as much as privacy!), but multiacc arbitrarily harder. I can’t imagine using the same chat account for my online gaming buddies and for my real family!

Selfhost able. But yeah, “decentralized” would be indeed a more fitting term.

“Everyone should be hosting a server” was NOT my point, sorry if I got misunderstood. My mother could in no way host an XMPP server on her own - but I could register her an account on mine.

Rather, I meant: a) if you can host it, suggest your friends and family to use your server; b) if you can’t - that is still better: with multiple public servers available, there is no single point of failure, you can choose a server in whatever jurisdiction you want, or even an onion/i2p one.

Moral of the story? Use selfhostable decentralized messaging instead.