> But until any of these new age apps/platforms support federation and decentralized communication, there's not much use for the masses to look for servers run by specific people.

Have you not heard of https://matrix.org?

100% open source server + client(s), decentralized, federated, easy to stand up your own server, end-to-end encryption, bridges to tons of other networks (IRC, telegram, slack, mattermost, etc), full history sync even when you log in from new devices, read receipts (even for individual users in group chats). They're by far (in my opinion) the most feature-rich of the "new-age" communication systems. I've been running my own homeserver for over a year now and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Thanks for the mention and the description of the features and benefits of Matrix. It sounds like music to my ears! I did hear about Matrix probably a year or two ago, but didn't think much of it at that time. I tend to look these up once every several months or so to see what's available and what improvements have happened. I'll have to check this out again.

> But until any of these new age apps/platforms support federation and decentralized communication, there's not much use for the masses to look for servers run by specific people.

Federation of self-hosted servers and the "official cloud" seems to be on Wire's road-map, cf:

* Third paragraph of OP

* https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/5vylls/wire_end...

* Last sentence on https://medium.com/@wireapp/open-sourcing-wire-server-code-e...

> native multi-platform/multi-OS support

Nope, just Electron.

In 2017 "native" mean "Chromium built as a library and bundled into (every) executable".

It really doesn't.

Some people use it that way sure, but they're wrong. You can either help point it out when they make the claim or you can be a part of the problem.

You can backup/restore Signal Desktop conversations from the Dev Tools console:

`Whisper.Backup.backupToDirectory()`

`Whisper.Backup.importFromDirectory()`

I can't do it on my phone though. And that's the device that might change after some time (years). AFAIK, Signal is coded explicitly to disallow backups of the data on iOS. Can't back it up with iTunes backup or on iCloud. I believe security was a reason (sacrificing UX deeply, IMO). I don't use Signal because of its comparatively poorer UX and feature set (the others I consider are Telegram and Wire). And without being able to backup conversations from an existing/old phone and restore them on a new phone, I'll never use it. I learned about this behavior the hard way during a previous switch and lost all my conversations (for some I had the patience to take screenshots).

>But until any of these new age apps/platforms support federation and decentralized communication, there's not much use for the masses to look for servers run by specific people.

What's the use case for self hosting ? Since it's supposed to be e2e, does self-hosting buy you anything ?

It’s a requirement many organizations have - government institutions are a good example. Some might want to not leak any data to the outside world, run it only for internal use, etc.

Depending on the details of the protocol, it might defend against certain patterns of traffic & contact analysis.