Email: The federated messaging service you already use

The talk is to highlight the values of services being federated. In order to emphasize this fact, a commonly used example is to be put forward: Emailing.

In this case, the term 'federated' is referring to the fact that all emailing providers use a standard protocol and one can communicate across providers (ex. if one person has only a gmail account and another person has only a disroot account, they can still communicate with each other).

During the course of this talk, an imaginary situation with a questions is going to be put forward: Suppose one day suddenly the service providers decide that one cannot communicate with other service providers, how would it affect our daily lives? And what would be the consequences and reactions?

At a later stage in the talk, it is going to be mentioned that while one can send emails cross-platform it is not the same for the commonly used messaging services (like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram etc.). Values and importance of XMPP protocol is going to be put forward.

At the end of the talk, there is going to be a pitch to use XMPP in general and Prav is going to be put forward.

While emailing and text messaging are largely similar, this talk will show how one is federated and how one is not. Also, where it is federated, we are used to making use of the federated features, whereas, certain providers actively decided not to make it federated for the other and we are largely accepting it.