Essentially, yes: nowadays you can go much further without basic understanding of what's going on. The ability to fire up magic black boxes that are somewhat functional without any configuration or understanding required is liberating at first, so it's perfectly understandable. I don't think it's a panacea, though.
From previous interactions in this community, it seems all but obvious nowadays, when peoples' experience with sysadmin in average amounts to running scripts running docker in some form.
Considering Matrix age, and precedents, my bets/hopes are for a new protocol to emerge as a "modern Matrix" (just like Matrix was marketing itself as "modern XMPP").
Matrix just doesn't have a great and smooth UX right now to compete with the main actors, the heavy protocol is to blame so that's not something we can hope to see sorted out quickly/on time.
I mean, if you want Matrix AND that it works, you just install ejabberd or prosody and go on with your life. But then there's nothing fancy to report or brag about, it just works.
I don't think that's a fair representation. Like for any community, you tend to hear the most about a vocal minority, and drama there was, indeed. That's not unique to Scala, that doesn't mean that a majority was engaged in it or was affected by it.
The point about fragmentation holds, though: Scala is a multi-paradigm language, so you tend to have communities assembling around core set of libraries and abstractions that fit their specific needs. It's not a bad thing from an engineering perspective (you get to pick the most adequate tool for the job), but it will be intimidating at first, and understandably ridiculous when coming from a different ecosystem that you've a choice of a dozen or so JSON deserializing libraries. https://index.scala-lang.org/ Is a great help, though.
In part. The whole idea behind snikket is to bundle together a bunch of pre-existing mainstream and well behaved XMPP clients and server under one consistent and polished package, so that it just works out of the box for the less savvy users and admins who then don't have to think too much about configuration and peers onboarding. So, yes, on Android, you will find a rebranded version of the Conversations client, prosody on the server, siskin on iOS, and IIRC they are working on a SDK for the desktop.
Do I? I'm just giving you textbook facts about authoritarianism and the consequences of living under one.
Whether you believe that this relates to your situation is something else. I'm not here to play mind games with you, all I can do is encourage you to simply look at the traits and definition of it, and bring your bingo card with you. Here it is, unaltered from Wikipedia:
Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law.[1][2] Authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic and may be based upon the rule of a party, the military, or the concentration of power in a single person.[3][4]
Also, I gain nothing from this "fantasy conversation" besides the hope that it might help the reader navigate through what's happening (and that they will avoid the worst of it).
And which state apparatus do you expect to come to the rescue when all powers are practically consolidated, and the one supposed to protect your rights is the same that oppresses you? Or the oppressor changes/makes-up the rules on a whim? You just don't seem to understand what authoritarianism is about, and how the deal is changing. Haven't you been taught history? People generally don't bring up words like "fascism" for fun and giggles...
That's the problem with authoritarianism: it no longer matters what is legal or not (the repressive state does as it pleases), and even if it did matter what's legal, too bad that's not up to you to decide anymore.
For one thing, I'm glad people finally come to such conclusions. Matrix has been a huge waste, and the tens of millions of investment would have done wonders if poured over better, more mature, healthier and more diverse protocols.
I came to bitwarden because we needed to share passwords with my SO and the way those replicate seamlessly on all our devices (desktop, laptop, iOS, Android) is a no brainer. Since bitwarden/vaultwarden is full self-hostable and open-source, I don't see why I would pass on its convenience.
Glad to hear that! That's an area of dsub which I appreciate: it's pretty clear what's cached offline and not, transitioning to offline is one tap away, and caching whole sub-trees of the library is easy and convenient. As a frequent flyer, I get that I might be an atypical user, but I rely on this very much.
Seems to me that those are generally enabled by bots and scripting, and I don't think it's any harder to do that stuff in XMPP than it is in discord?