People who make these sort of comments strike me as the same sort of people who box tick features in software development without ever giving consideration to UX. There’s always an open or decentralized alternative to whatever big bad closed/proprietary thing is being complained about. You can usually contrive together an argument for how it almost has feature parity. But only if stick your fingers in your ears and wilfully ignore the fact that the user experience is almost never up to scratch.

Just as a side node: I use Element currently and have done so for a while. My comment was about me not recommending this thing to my non-techie friends, not about me inventing an excuse why I won't use it.

And I want to be able to recommend it. I just currently can't, this was the point of my comment.

Exactly. When network effect is in play, the bar for adoption must be set incredibly low. There is no way any of my non-tech friends is going to spend even 5 minutes investigating “XMPP” or whatever.

If it’s anything more than open app >> fill in phone number or create account >> see list of people to chat with, it’s already dead in the water.

Quicksy is made to be as easy as you say to get an XMPP account and automatically recognize contacts :

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.quicksy.cli...

https://quicksy.im/