This whole episode is giving me flashbacks to the ActiveX days.

The tyranny of the default.

“Here mum, I’ve installed Firefox for you, it’s better than Chrome in every way!”
“My knitting circle website doesn’t work, I can’t download patterns, it says I need Chrome”

Internet Explorer was effectively abandon-ware for a decade after Microsoft used their OS pseudo-monopoly to crush Netscape.
It took another tech giant abusing THEIR monopoly to relegate IE to the trash heap it should have already been on.

Comforting and Terrifying.
Comferrifying?
Terriforting?

So you won’t use your banks website?
Or your utilities (gas/water/electricity/internet)?
You won’t let your kids use the portal at their school for submitting assignments?
Your government sites for renewing your drivers license or scheduling hard refuse pickup?

I can think of lots of reasons that will force me to have chrome installed if this goes ahead.

It’s irrelevant to this community which is pro signal.

Signal provides a user experience comparable to iMessage in terms of features and ease of use, but with the big plus of cross platform compatibility.
That may not be what you personally are after, but it’s what 99.99% of potential Signal users are after.

Signal tieing into the social graph we already have on our phones as user identifiers is a big win for 99.99% of users.
Signal being run through a centralised location is a big win for the 99.99% of users who don’t want to host their own servers, or find someone to do it for them.
Signal attempting to earn income through things like money transfer is a good thing for the 99.99% of users who don’t want to have themselves monetized in a different way (such as through showing users ads).

If a nation state wants to spy on you, you better be important enough to a different nation state that they protect you.
Because choosing to send GPG encrypted messages over XMPP isn’t going to help you.

The Back to the Future trilogy is good for a re-view.

I mean yes, but that’s not a federation problem.

To completely strawman AND slippery slope what you’re saying:

As a car safety pro, who primarily deals with car crashes:

STOP

TOWING

TRAILERS

Agreed, dangerous, I don’t want numpties doing it.
But it’s a large part of why I have a car.

I want to be clear, that I disagree with his “federation is stupid” point, but email has problems right now.

Theoretically it’s federated, theoretically you can spin up your own mail server and self host.

But even if you do that absolutely perfectly (SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc), you can falsely end up on spam list, that effectively block delivery of your email to large segments of the network for days if not weeks.

Whilst theoretically federated, email falls under the broad dominion of google, microsoft and a couple of other large players.

I never owned a console, but I distinctly remember playing this, so there must have been a PC port some time in the early 90s.

Classic game.

The condescension in that makes it clear that the smug social network is whichever one the author happens to use.