This may not always be true, in a practical sense, for those with intense cultural pressure to fit in. And fitting in means having a green bubble, i.e. Apple phone.
The mass consumer market won't all join IRC to chat, they could have (and still can) for decades and it just isn't happening. And that's fine, but that also means that other systems (like iMessage but also Facebook) gain users with all the lock-in that comes with that.
In any case nobody I know feels constrained by their choice of messenger app.
Probably because you've already excluded them
But no - I mean because they use multiple apps. E.g. WhatsApp, or Facebook messenger, or Signal etc. Even the people I know who have iPhones tend to use these things. If I want to know what kind of phone someone uses, I generally have to ask.
The thesis seems to be that people are so unable to think for themselves that they are compelled to choose their device by means of colored bubbles.
If this is really true, then surely it’s the best argument one can possibly make for why the ecosystem needs to be locked down.
> You can still buy a different device, not take part in an existing system, and do whatever you want.
The point is you can't. Intense social pressure to interact with people who _do_ take part in the existing system means you have to partake in the existing system to interact.
My friends use Messenger so I need a facebook account, or my family uses WhatsApp so I need a non-rooted android phone.
No mainstream messaging apps support federation and many are hostile towards reverse engineering. WhatsApp for example will permaban accounts who do not use official clients in the name of "security."
You don't notice because you have already excluded anyone who chooses not to use a mainstream Android or iOS device. Or anyone you know who _would_ like to make that choice doesn't, cause they don't want to be that one friend who can't be reached as easily as the rest of the group.
It’s true that if you need to interact with people on most of these systems, you need an account. I have a Facebook account I use only for messenger, and I would prefer not to.
However, your argument has a few flaws.
1. I obviously haven’t excluded the people would would like to choose a non-mainstream device but who hasn’t.
2. You seem to assume that I won’t install apps so that I can communicate with people who don’t use the networks I’m already part of. That’s not a reasonable assumption. I have quite a few messaging apps installed, some of which I use with just one person.
The question this raises for me is - are there any federated messaging networks that do not have any clients available for mainstream platforms, but are in significant use?
There is no true ideal version of this, there is no perfect world and there is no situation in which you can have full control but also have full protection without also knowing everything about the system you have.
Phones and Computers are 'appliances' that do not need to be changed by the user (and we are talking about the mass-market user here), if anything it needs to prevent being changed by the user due to the larger ecosystem a device is part of.
You can make the choice to not be part of the ecosystem, but most people would very much like to be part of a system, together, and one way of doing that is to have a level of sameness and consistency that so far is not viable without some sort of 'appliance-like' properties of the devices in question.
You can still buy a different device, not take part in an existing system, and do whatever you want. But you will have a hard time getting the benefits of interconnection, scale, and support. Those three elements are pretty much why some brands or devices are sold in masses and some aren't.
To this end I simply have multiples of most things. Some just need to do what it does for everyone else (interconnect, function the same way every day, have some company bear responsibility for practically everything), others are for me (open source hardware, open source software, no protections, but also no end-user support or responsibility).