A high churn rate is bad for federation - federation requires a spec, and specs are like unit tests. You don't want to write them in the experimentation phase before you know what you're building.
Over time the churn will slow down (this is happening already) and we'll probably see a standardish set of decent messaging features that everyone wants. (Good notifications, emoji, photos, low battery consumption, e2e encryption and obviously a gif keyboard.)
When we know what we want it shouldn't be too hard to write a spec and start drumming up interest in some decent opensource federated servers and clients. Signal might be a great place to start - but I think we should wait another year or two. Even signal isn't stable enough yet.
(And no, this hasn't happened yet with XMPP. XMPP has, for a variety of reasons completely failed. We need to let it die and start from scratch with something actually designed with mobile devices in mind)
[0] Not that it was all that open, but at least we had third party apps.
Though this isn't where I got the idea, I read about it the other day when I had some downtime.
I accept your challenge and will prove the future is in fact quite bright! :)
Incredible insights on companies fighting for market share. This is leading to all of the innovation now, and soon the dust will settle. At which point, we can sweep in and offer something unique to the common user!
I think we all agree with that.
If you feel (as I do) that they haven't sufficiently adapted to the current era, why do you think any other open protocol would be able to change more easily?