shrugal

Not everyone is a FOSS maximalist.

Imo multi-billion dollar companies are the big problem, because they often have monopolies and will use them to push crap down our throats. Much smaller companies can still offer good software and support, and they are sometimes the only viable option. I'd prefer it if everything was open-source of course, but that's just not how the world works right now.

I love Signal, but at the end of the day they still operate a centralized service with all the drawbacks that entails. It only takes a change of leadership to kick of progressive enshitification, just look at what happened to WhatsApp. Being run by a non-profit should help, but the chance always exists with centralized control. Also their multi-device support is still not great, no official support for Android tablets for example. And idk why not, because Molly (Signal fork) recently added that without too much difficulty afaik.

Session looks really interesting imo, kinda like a decentralized and multi-device version of Signal.

I self host an email server at home with a 1€/month domain from strato.de, and I just use their SMTP server as relay. No issues so far, and they also include a backup mx for when my home server goes offline.

A true modern successor to The Guild (aka Europa 1400). That concept has soooo much potential imo, but the games after the first were notoriously underfunded, half-baked and riddled with bugs!

It's not like you'd only self host Bitwarden on that server.

precisely what Matrix developers are advertising Matrix to be

Idk what stuff you're reading, but every dev talk I've seen includes many acknowledgments of the shortcomings that still exist and the difficulty of the underlying problems. I never had the impression that they're trying to sell a silver bullet that'll fix everything once and for all. It's mostly just incremental changes here and there that fix or improve certain parts of the system, and with that a steady progress towards the goal.

Arathorn telling everyone that everything is fine

I wouldn't give too much on the speculations and opinions of any one person, even if he's the Matrix project lead. Probably especially the project lead, because part of his job is being optimistic about changes so they actually happen. But this is still mostly uncharted territory, and all anyone can do is make best effort attempts to improve things bit by bit. And from what I've seen he also openly talks about issues and the limits of coming changes, so perhaps you just read too much into his more optimistic posts and comments?

Personally I'm just excited for new developments, but also aware that any change has to prove itself in the field before it can be declared a solution for anything.

I really don't get this attitude. It's not like global decentralized instant messaging with all the usability, bells and whistles of centralized services is an easy problem to solve. And no one is selling anything, not to regular users at least. If you thought that this would be a straight forward path to a finished product then idk what to tell you, that's not how this works.

The counter points on the site you posted are either completely expected or even desired properties of distributed systems (like not being able to force a delete or room closure on another server), or just problems with specific implementation details or insufficient clarity in the specs (like interop hickups or handling of media files). As far as I can tell nothing on the list is an "unfixable" protocol bug or core design flaw.

Admitting problems and improving/replacing your protocol is good, you make it sound like a bad thing. I mean you could argue that they should have started with this, but imo better late than never. From what I've seen this will take load off of the client AND the server, because both don't have to sync thousands and thousands of events anymore. It basically looks like an indexing/caching layer between client and server, which is standard practice to make things go faster, especially for thin clients.

Watch one kurzgesagt video about how to destroy the planet.

I chose my instance partly because of their anti-spam and defederation policy, so I don't have to do it myself. Imo instance blocking would be a nice feature on top, but not as a replacement. You can always switch instances or create your own if you don't like what your current instance is doing. I think we should rather improve that part of the system, so being able to easily move accounts and communities between instances.

Also, your instance hosts the content of federated instances for you (excl. images), and there is some stuff they just can't or don't want to have on their servers. That's just something you have to respect when using a service they provide to you imo.

• 12€/year for a domain incl. backup mx and sending relay for emails
• 10€/year for encrypted backup
• Energy cost of my NAS (unknown yet)
• 48€/year for a ways service

So just under 6€/month + electricity.