The only personal electronic communication I use are the only two widely deployed federated protocols: email and SMS. Everything else involves compromises to enter a walled garden that offers no value to me.

Sure but you do understand that makes you the outlier these days, right?

Most people are on Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp or Signal or a dozen similar platforms. I try to use Signal for most communications but have friends and family that won't move to it, so I also use Whatsapp or plain SMS with them.

Is SMS federated though? Genuine question. As far as I know it requires manual each-to-each setup on MNO level thus very fragile when we talk about cross-border or even cross-operator messaging. It is nowhere near email in terms of federation.

My experience in 2025 must be extremely different from yours. I don't even know what alternate channels you might have in mind.

Chat. Matrix for nerds, discord for gamers and redditors, telegram for everyone else who cares and imessage/rcs for those who don’t.

Exactly zero people I regularly communicate with other than my teenage son uses any of those regularly.

The only people who use RCS to contact me are businesses sending notifications or spam.

Unlike e-mail where I do get personal correspondence regularly.

I don't expect my experience is typical, but I don't think yours are either - we all live in bubbles.

I suppose you could say being younger is living in a bubble. I assure you nobody under 35 is using email for the majority of their personal correspondance. Email is for business.

The claim above that we responded to was much broader.

What's chat? I've used discord, but do 100x the volume in email and sms.