A bar (place where you drink) is another type of a messaging system. Yu can meet people in them and have conversations there. That doesn’t mean it’s best to crowd everyone into one giant bar claiming that increases utility, compared with letting people freely open their own bars. Especially if the avowed purpose of the bar is enabling private conversations (facilitating giving you and your friend Bob a private place to talk, as opposed to creating a meeting place for strangers).
I can understand visiting a giant bar if I want to mingle with randos in public. If I want to talk privately with my friend, I want a small, private bar, preferably one whose existence is not known to anyone outside of my friend group. If the giant bar operator is going out of his way to prevent me from doing that, I have to say he is up to something not so good.
Sorry about the strained analogy but at least it didn’t mentioned cars. Well, until just now.
Zak@lemmy.world 4 days ago
The analogy between a private messaging service and a bar is not just strained; it’s nonsensical.
It might work for a chat system that’s mainly public and discoverable like Matrix, IRC, or Discord. A community having too many people, or any people who don’t follow certain norms can make it unpleasant. As long as it keeps out spammers, Signal having people I don’t want to talk to on it won’t affect me at all; I just won’t give those people my phone number or username.