> "I think this is just not true, my grandmother would use whatever I tell her to use she doesn't care if Signal has "better UI" according to some people."

Protocols are slower to change, this is why XMPP lost to competing messaging services. Maybe grandma is a bad example, but a highschool kid is going to use the messaging service that has the emojis and crap they like - not one with a crappy app and confusing encryption setup. I don't think it's lack of knowledge I think it's just harder to create an experience as good and you're at a perpetual disadvantage to roll out new features.

> "Why can't Moxie and Signal just run a Matrix server and offer this service to people?"

Moxie mostly outlines the reasons here: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ - the answer is mostly the same as above, it won't be competitive and it'll lose.

> "Most people use WhatsApp maybe Telegram, not Signal and definitely not Matrix the future will tell us if this catches on or not, so let's just stop speculating. There is already now some governments using Matrix and a lot of projects, so there are already many servers and many providers, you can also just pay for your own server at Element and you're already not using Matrix.org"

This is kind of my point? Except that I'd go further and say most use FB Messenger, iMessage, or Discord. I did pay for an Element server for a while to support the Matrix devs. While I want them to succeed I think the existing incentives are such that they will remain niche. Most will use centralized options because they provide a better experience and most users don't care about federation. The UX is everything.

> "[Spam] is a general problem that you'll have with any platform"

Unless you think about it from first principles and actually come up with a way to solve it: https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit - if you have NFTs as a permenant pseudonymous ID with a low but non-zero cost, moderation becomes trivial and spam is no longer economically possible. Today centralized services have an advantage fighting spam (email is the easiest example) and decentralized services struggle with this.

> "Or better because many people are working on it compared to 30 people"

I think this has been shown to be empirically false with this kind of service. Not because of the number of people, but because of the reasons federation on the existing stack is hard.

> "I heard of [urbit] before, it sounded cool at the time but I didn't get enough info the details to remember much, I don't really understand how this is relevant though, care to elaborate?"

The pitch is basically that the problems that cause federated systems to fail (at the application level) run pretty deep. To fix it you have to rethink some assumptions with modern operating systems and how you handle identity across the web. If you fix these issues, then it becomes possible (but not easy) to solve the UX problems that causes federated applications on the web to fail and provide a better experience than the existing web for applications. If you can fix the incentives then you can escape the trap we're in.

> "I don't think Element or Matrix is aiming to be a niche nerd hobby, they have a lot of money invested in them"

You're totally right - they want to take over the world, and I want them to win too, I just don't think they can because of the current local maximum we're trapped in. It's moloch (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/).