All files stored on IPFS are public. It’s also incredibly slow and inefficient. You would be better off using BitTorrent.

The most offensive thing here is the amount={5} attribute. What is it? It’s not XML.

The NGO is a decoy organization with exactly the same people (minus one) as the VC funded startup. Go look at the “core spec team” and find out which organization they belong to.

Your information on XMPP seems to be quite outdated. File transfer in XMPP is now mostly done by uploading the file via HTTP and sending the URL. Audio calls are done using WebRTC and work two ways.

“protocol extensions” (aka: incompatible)

Reality shows that implementations can very well implement the same extensions. If you don’t use extremely outdated clients you will find they do have compatible file transfer and A/V calls. ActivityPub works the same way.

Meanwhile Matrix Ltd. cooks up a completely new, incompatible protocol instead of building upon existing internet standards.

I don’t see the reason we need a venture capital funded bloated protocol anyways. Just switch to XMPP. It’s much more lightweight and it’s the internet standard for instant messaging.

Here is what I used before I switched to desec.io: https://gist.github.com/haansn08/50565768c66c5fbf382b2bc2484e8a41

Texstudio + git > Overleaf

Sync between devices. I only read RSS on one device so I don’t need it either. Besides if you don’t think a service is useful to you why do you host it?

Isn’t Bluesky much smaller than Mastodon?

But it gets easier with every thing. You learn the more general concepts too.

I have spent […] thousands of hours trying to setup various different services on various different platforms

I don’t believe you. If you spend that much time on something you get good at it.

Settings > Default Font. (This is a serious answer for Firefox 120).

Facebook, mostly. For China it’s WeChat.

We can only imagine how the internet was to the natives before the eternal September.

It’s a good thing nothing critical depends on this, then!

Nothing in the XMPP RFCs says you can’t do that. Go ahead.

At least the private contact discovery is not very private:

The client calculates the truncated SHA256 hash of each phone number in the device’s address book.
The client transmits those truncated hashes to the service.

Phone numbers are so not-sparse that there even was a game to text your “number neighbor”. I can probably build a pretty effective rainbow table for this with my current hardware.

WhatsApp started is an XMPP client, but they use lots of proprietary extensions (doesn’t matter since they don’t federate). You can build very robust and scalable messengers with it if you want to.

The open source implementations are developed by like 1-2 guys in their spare time and they’re not far behind (and sometimes even ahead) other federated messengers which received tens of millions in venture capital funding.

XMPP is the IETF Internet Standard while Matrix is just another custom IM protocol managed by a venture capital funded startup which keeps losing money.

If you need to convince your friends to use some app it might as well be XMPP compatible instead of another walled garden. If you can get your friends on board, you win, even if nobody else uses it.