It seems easy, but the moment you ask the user to “choose their instance” - you already push away a lot of untechnical people. What is an instance? How do I know which one is good? Will I be able to talk to people on other instances (look at Lemmy, some instances are blocked by other instances)? Why do I even have to choose an instance?

From an UX standpoint, that’s a disaster. Stuff like Lemmy or Mastodon will remain forever a niche, because of that.

EDIT: Typo

Okay, try explaining it to my 51 years old father. Or someone who really isn’t into tech in general.

Federated stuff will work for you and I - technically knowledgeable people. But we are a tiny fraction of population. The success of WhatsApp lays in its super simplicity.

Oh I think there is hundreds reasons to shit on Apple, but this ain’t one of them.

Great! If you’re technical and not have iOS. That’s already 50% of British market not using it.

Besides, it won’t help you if that’s a government mandate, and Google will be forced to take it down for the UK market from the store. Not a lot of people are installing apps from outside the Play Store.

Everyone commeting here saying “good, we will switch to X” is absolutely stupid. This law means no iMessage, no Signal, no WhatsApp, no Telegram, no secure encrypted messaging for anyone.