Signal's approach has its share of problems, too. It took OWS two years from the start of iOS development to deliver voice and text support. (They may not have been working on it the whole time, but that just underscores the problem.) The iOS app doesn't support rotation. Desktop support was a long time coming, and the multi-device experience still kind of sucks.
It's great that WhatsApp could push end-to-end encryption to a billion users at once. But none of my friends who care about end-to-end encryption trust Facebook, and Signal isn't winning over the others.
Good answers : An Objection to ‘The ecosystem is moving’ https://gultsch.de/objection.html
Juste think about how the web and Internet evolved. Juste think about how the web and Internet evolved
What percent of DNS lookups use DNSSEC?
What percent of email is e2e encrypted?
What percent of NTP lookups are signed, encrypted, or trust worthy?
What percent of HTTPS traffic would not die by a trivial downgrade attack?
What XMPP client allows you to click on it in the apple/google play store, auto discover any contacts using it, and start chatting (with e2e) in 30 seconds?
Are things getting better? Certainly, it's rather slow progress though. I don't see how signal could have gotten as far as has, as quickly as it has, without controlling both server and client, and skipping federated.
Sure, by leading by example hopefully the bar is raised. All the signal compromises (controlling client and server, non federating, using GCM, requiring a sim, etc) seem to be well justified to get pretty good security to a large number of diverse people quickly.
Sure federated would be great, as would be independence from the whisper systems servers which can be easily blocked (like in egypt).
So sure hopefully someone comes up with something that manages the strengths of signals with federation and censor resistance. Not sure that will look much like XMPP though.
XMPP seems a morass of optional pieces, so clients and servers implement random subsets and it makes life difficult for random users to use securely. Moxie makes a good point about and federated standard without control of client and server is going to evolve very slowly an fracture into incompatible pieces.