Yeah, true - I have this installed but inactive for emergencies. It cannot, however, deliver messages when the recipient is offline, and I don’t know how much it drains the battery if left on. So not sure I’d use it as a daily messenger.

I would also prefer a server in a jurisdiction that I choose as suitable for my needs. Or, better, a mini-computer on my balcony.

Not to mention the SMS bills

I am more worried about how this would be enforced. I’ve heard that China forces the major mobile games to scan the user’s face once in a while, which would be horrifying in a similar scenario, especially applied to everything, not just games.

Having social media not be soft-required for school would be awesome though. I hated having to be on VKontakte as a kid and hate having to be on Telegram now.

Well, technically, they could MITM the traffic similarly to how they did to jabber . ru. But a) there are mitigations for this and b) more importantly - they would need to bother. No one’s going to bother doing it to a random family server that has attracted no previous attention.

I don’t think any ban on such selfhostable servers is enforceable at all.

That is the problem of getting another person to change something… A very valid problem but not inherent to decentralization.

Selfhost able. But yeah, “decentralized” would be indeed a more fitting term.

“Everyone should be hosting a server” was NOT my point, sorry if I got misunderstood. My mother could in no way host an XMPP server on her own - but I could register her an account on mine.

Rather, I meant: a) if you can host it, suggest your friends and family to use your server; b) if you can’t - that is still better: with multiple public servers available, there is no single point of failure, you can choose a server in whatever jurisdiction you want, or even an onion/i2p one.

Moral of the story? Use selfhostable decentralized messaging instead.