This is a core problem of distributed systems though. Signal even cites this as their reason to not federate with anyone.

Once you get decentralization going you need everyone to stay kind of up to date or stuff will just not work.

It is not. Discord’s protocol has been tailormade to suit Discord and the developers will not give a single thought about keeping it stable because only the Discord server&client are meant to use it.

An XMPP developer would likely have been delusional about the protocol he himself developed. But at the time I can assure you XMPP was completely irrelevant. AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo! and maybe IRC were the tools of the day back then.

Because of actual competition (which XMPP had absolutely no part in) multi protocol messengers had their golden age then.

No.

• I want to send messages to people who are not currently online (having a server stay online for you is a desparate hack and not a solution)
• I want to send media other than text
• I want my messages to be e2ee
• I want presence - e.g. know if someone is available, busy, away
• I want voice/video calls

and many more…

None of these were solved by IRC but by the others you mentioned.

Also Matrix can bridge to XMPP, of course you wouldn’t because nobody uses XMPP.

No. There was nothing to extend and extinguish with XMPP. It was a dead on arrival protocol that nobody ever used seriously. I’ve been to the internet at that time and what people actually used was: AIM, ICQ, MSN and possibly even Yahoo!. (IRC for the nerds and Counter-Strike)

It was exactly the other way around. Nobody ever used XMPP, then Google opened federation on their first chat and suddenly someone was actually reachable via XMPP which was a cool thing for some nerds that were into XML then, but when Google noticed that it only imports problems with nothing to gain from the XMPP network they just shut it off.

At the time nobody cared because the people accidentally using XMPP didn’t give a shit about it because they used Google not XMPP in the first place.

That’s not even true, I run my own mailserver for private and a business and it works like expected.

Yet people claim it writes all their programming code…

The analogy is that you buy a car (because if it breaks, the car and your entertainment stuff, you will buy a new one to replace it, you will also carry all maintenance) but suddenly you can’t drive backwards anymore because the manufacturer decided retroactively that you should pay extra for that (possibly in a subscription).

I would say it is your good right then to make your car drive backwards regardless of what it may take.

The load distributes across more shoulders automatically.

If you only host a server for yourself and 10 friends it costs next to nothing, if you have a big operation it can get just as expensive, it depends on what you are willing to do.

With centralized systems there is no choice but for the one centralized host to host everything.

You really don’t know the history of Microsoft, do you?

The interface gets a little better and that’s it basically? (Alternatively: They try to spin a social medium around it and fail somewhat and succeed somewhat?)

Same thing with centralised services only that you have no options to choose from

Thing is nobody will do that because once AI finds a way to spazz out that is totally unpredictable (black box) everything might just be gone.

It’s a totally unrealistic scenario.

I mean that is exactly what programming is except you type to an AI and have it type the script. What is that good for?

Could have just typed the script in the first place.

It ChatGPT can use the API it can’t be too complex otherwise you are in for a surprise once you find out what ChatGPT didn’t care about (caching, usage limits, pricing, usage contracts)

Unfortunately everything AI does is kind of shitty. Sure you might have a query for which the chosen AI works well but you might as well not.

It you accept that it sometimes just doesn’t work at all sure AI is your revolution. Unfortunately there are not too many use cases where this is helpful.

It doesn’t or do you have serious applications for self-modifying code?

It’s the other way round. Code is being written to fit how a specific machine works. This is what makes Assembly so hard.

Also there is by design no understanding required, a machine doesn’t “get” what you are trying to do it just does what is there.

If you want a machine to understand what specific code does and modify that for another machine that is extremely hard because the machine would need to understand the semantics of the operation. It would need to “get” what you were doing which isn’t happening.

That game would still not work because there is a ton of hidden state in all but the simplest computer games that you cannot tell from just playing through the game normally.

An AI could probably reinvent flappy birds because there is no more depth than what is currently on screen but that’s about it.

No. Programs cannot reprogram themselves in a useful way and are very very far from it.