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Our voice phone systems are seamlessly federated. You can call people across carriers, over national boundaries, instantaneously, and the only friction is slightly more numbers to dial.
SMS is also remarkably well federated. In the early 2000s, every carrier had their own text messaging platform. Today, you can send an SMS to practically anyone.
So here's my question: why the hell do we mess around with so many proprietary OTT services? Why do you have some friends who WhatsApp, others who Telegram, others who Signal? Why do we have to figure out whether to Zoom or Meet or FaceTime or Jitsi? We are literally all carrying phones 24x7. Let's just use our phones.
@evan Others have already said good answers (cost, video, privacy). I’ll also add audio quality fwiw.
My counter question is why bother with Fediverse when IRC already exists?
@jerclarke irc isn't federated.
@evan I can talk to anyone in the world with it, if I'm willing to deal with longer names. That's the only argument about phone numbers that matters, and it applies to IRC, doesn't it?
People care about features and POTS doesn't have good features. I'm not sure what you're angling for with this line of questioning, but to me the conclusion to be drawn is “federation on its own is not a selling point if the system is lacking the features people care about”.
