Some people want anonymity. Mobile phones do not provide it.

Yes they do? You can install system wide Tor on android. If you are referring to the fact that phones emit signals that can be triangulated, that doesn't interfere with anonymity in and of itself.

The fact that towers can ID which phones go where does interfere however.

I mean, it literally interferes with anonymity in the most fundamental way.

"Everywhere you go, even when you're not actively using your phone, it's still listening." - Edward Snowden

With a SIM card, you are by definition always tracked and identified individually. It's how the technology is designed to function. You can remove the SIM card, harden your OS, randomize your Wifi MAC but at that point you aren't really using a _cell phone_ anymore.

You could use the same argument for the radios in your home and WiFi. And anonymity is about your name. If they can locate your phone but not be used to identify you then it doesn't break anonymity.

mobile hostile how ? I found tor browser on android pretty lean (quite surprisingly so)

In terms of bandwidth, compute resources and also just the amount of time the modem has to remain powered on to transmit data.

Matrix makes sense for private invite-based chats, but for that we have Signal. I think some of the DID/pseudonymity features Dorsey's AT protocol will be the best future bet for facilitating true desire and revealed preferences. Matrix feels a bit derivative, solving a problem too late for a community that may have aged out and dispersed. It would have been the best IRC/SILC alternative ever, if the culture still supported the interaction model of those prior techs.

It's not so much that internet protocols are hostile as cellular internet connections are bad (random round trip time leads to TCP back-off, often no ipv4) and smart phones are energy limited re: radio modem activity (can't hold open a TCP connection).

They require crutches and compromises to be made to participate in the internet. Usually this is in the form of a incorporated entity doing the hand holding.

The behavior you describe with cell phones is also how overall internet access works in many geographic regions.

There are areas where residential internet is fast and reliable, but if you’re building a service that sucks on bandwidth/energy/throughput constrained links, you’re building a service that’s not viable for tons of users.

You're right. In the last decade or so the capabilities of the average internet user have degraded significantly. Should we handicap all software to accommodate these people? Profit motive says yes and incorporated entities surely will do so. But it is not the right move for human persons.

The people with bad internet connections are human persons.

The idea that to make something that works for those people we have to make systems that are worse for people with fast internet is a false dichotomy. We can (and should) make services and systems that work well for everybody.

How exactly is it handicapped? Last I saw, modern software like Matrix does everything IRC does and 100x more.

That's exactly it. Mobile phone users have to use things like matrix with extremely heavy protocol overhead and someone else hosting their client software and maintaining connection (for the vast majority it's element.io in browser using their owned matrix.org homeserver).

Note for mobile users: you can setup quassel server to connect to IRC and use the quassel client on your phone. The quassel server acts as an intermediary that keeps the IRC connection stable.