I'm optimistic about self-hosting/self sovereignty (which both fall under the umbrella of what I call indie hosting) long term.
But I think both of these articles gloss over the fact that end-to-end encryption has never been shown to work in a real system with normal people. Key management is a completely unsolved problem.
If you don't have e2ee, with current tooling most people will need someone they trust to run their server. But then you run into a privacy paradox: most people have more content they would rather have google looking at/training on than someone close to them looking at, than the other way around.
Personally I think the next step forward is improving software to be more turnkey so everyone can run their own as a GUI app on an old laptop or phone.
That said, we definitely need protocols for sharing stuff.
I think so, this looks like the feature where adding an new linked device transfers messages from your phone.
What still isn't possible as far as I am aware is transferring messages from Android to iOS or vice versa. Last time I looked into this was a few weeks ago.
These are all solved problems depending on what someone is after.
Tools like tailscale/headscale combined with proxmox give most people point and click self hosting close to using a digital ocean droplet (which should never be used in production).
It doesn't matter what people are currently doing. In Matrix, there is a possibility to make reliable, encrypted backups. It can also be done with a simple interface.
But I think both of these articles gloss over the fact that end-to-end encryption has never been shown to work in a real system with normal people. Key management is a completely unsolved problem.
If you don't have e2ee, with current tooling most people will need someone they trust to run their server. But then you run into a privacy paradox: most people have more content they would rather have google looking at/training on than someone close to them looking at, than the other way around.
Personally I think the next step forward is improving software to be more turnkey so everyone can run their own as a GUI app on an old laptop or phone.
That said, we definitely need protocols for sharing stuff.