It is. My father loathes mobile devices (or rather the stranglehold they seem to have on some people) but he has no qualms against using a PC. I converse with him daily through Telegram. My mother uses Telegram as well, on both her mobile as well as a tablet and her PC.
There’s plenty of nice XMPP clients for desktop, though. I do agree, however, that there is a void to be filled by an XMPP client with good discovery.
The latency and battery problems everyone was blaming are solved now. The missing piece is this:
A way to provide XMPP service for any address, in particular gmail addresses, without both touching any DNS config and without any support from whoever controls the domain (RIP Google Talk).
Basically from UX perspective:
1) User downloads an app (mobile or desktop).
2) User confirms email address via either email confirmation (it’s good enough for SSL, so…) or OAuth flow
3) That’s it.
4) Bonus: For OAuth flow user has prepopulated address book.
Behind the scenes at step 2 a unique ID is associated with the email address. Then other clients resolve this via something, DHT, blockchain, whatever.
This introduces some trusted oracle that assists in discovery, but keeps everything else decentralized.
Build this and it can certainly compete with Telegrams of this world.
Unfortunately, I don’t think Keybase can be compatible by itself with email or phone № proofs. Perhaps if they explicitly add support for oracles, that would be cool.
