This is just one of the comments on the Revolt E2EE issue, I guess the author felt so proud of their opinion to make it into a blog post, I wouldn't say anything if they at least revisited the whole discussion and tried to make a reasonable summary.
The argument provided in the article against features is simply "too hard to develop, too hard to maintain, nobody cares enough".
If nobody cared, nobody would go on Matrix, if everything that was hard to develop were just dropped before even trying, we would have stopped at the hello world (not implying I'm not a lazy developer, but I surely don't want to imply that there aren't brilliant people out there who can undertake scarily big tasks).
Giving another feature as a sort of replacement: federated identities, is not a replacement at all, it's a completely different scope. I just can't empathise with the point that they try to make
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That was well thought out. Thanks for sharing
Downvoter's did not read the article they just saw "don't federate" and downvote lol.
Different models for different cases, right? It's only a counterpoint if one believes that the message is "federate everything."
There is no privacy guarantee in federated systems. There's no privacy in public forums, full stop; nor should there be any expectation of any. You can barely achieve any privacy trust in 1:1 communications, and much less any form of many-to-many.
Anonymity is another matter - you can have anonymity, if you're careful, but privacy? No. Federation is not about providing privacy, or even anonymity - there's no section either in the AP specification.
For private communications, you use different technologies; P2P is a good option, but you can get privacy and anonymity in federated systems like Nostr, which - while capable of being a public forum - has all the parts needed to achieve anonymity and privacy.
Tox has a good model which they can't seem to get to work. 0xchat is interesting.
It gets said repeatedly: you tailer your solution to your threat model; there's one size fits all.
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