> You may personally prefer it just as some niche audience still personally prefers to run their own email server, but your grandma will never prefer it or use it and neither will 90% of the public.

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. The reason in my opinion why people don't use Element or other Matrix clients yet is because people aren't aware of them. Signal has a billionaire behind them and that means they advertise the shit out of Signal.

> Email is an example of this class of failure. Almost everyone uses a centralized provider (mostly Google) and even if you do go through the effort to run your own server since nearly everyone you interact with is using gmail it's mostly pointless anyway.

Why can't Moxie and Signal just run a Matrix server and offer this service to people? Your point seems to be - we lost the fight already so there's nothing to do. I think there's a lot to do and Google/Facebook/Apple have not yet won. Even if they have most people at least the people who really care have the opportunity to stay private AND free. Many people still use Hotmail, Yahoo, university accounts, business accounts, privacy concerned providers, government accounts and even famous country specific providers. Gmail is the most used one but it's by far not the only one and the way to fight that is not by giving up on a free world.

> Signal is not controlled by the USG (see recent doc about what metadata they have access to via Signal).

Signal is a company registered in the USA they will have to abide the US law when push comes to shove, so this is not a long term solution.

> I ran a Matrix server for a while, the UX around setting up encryption is bad (not for lack of trying, it's just a hard problem given the constraints).

It's getting better and it's partially like that because it's more private(no phone number) and secure(no US company) than Signal, it also contains an encrypted backup on the server which is a huge feature that Signal just does not have.

> Most people just use the Matrix.org server and will never run their own (which is the recentralization risk I'm talking about) - at best you'll have a couple providers

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

> and dealing with spam is still a problem.

That's a general problem that you'll have with any platform, Telegram and Facebook are still fighting spam with little many failures. If anything this is something that I see a good future with Matrix since a lot of different companies/individuals will try to fight this together instead of a big company trying alone and failing.

> You'll also have a system that adapts slowly because it's harder to make changes to this kind of system, it'll always be worse.

Or better because many people are working on it compared to 30 people (!!)

> To escape the incentives that lead back to recentralization and to create a federated system that isn't just another niche nerd hobby, you really have to think about the issues that lead back to centralization from first principles. I think Urbit's design and the tradeoffs they make do this.

I heard of this project 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?

I don't think Element or Matrix is aiming to be a niche nerd hobby, they have a lot of money invested in them (last I read it was 30 million) and the UI is super cool (much cooler than Signal)

At the end of the day Signal and Matrix are both niche and it's just such a pity that we don't go for the obviously better choice but instead put all our eggs in one American basket yet again.