It’s not reasonable to assume that most people are going to self-host, or even how to go about doing that if they wanted to, but people still deserve a right to privacy and products that support that. I think that’s what they were trying to say

Not all trains. I’ve yet to see a subway with one

and your phone only has one number… right?

Dual-SIM phones are a thing and have been for a LONG time. They’re not as common in the US (where I’m assuming you’re from given you aren’t familiar with dual-SIM phones) but even my S22 supports it, and I think even iPhones come with it stock now. A lot of people use two SIM cards for a multitude of reasons, and so many people have two numbers. Heck, some phones even support three SIM cards.

Dig they bring out a PC client yet btw?

It’s been out for a long time now. You have to set it up on your phone first but then you install the application on your computer, scan a QR code to link it, and at that point you can just disable notifications on your phone if you don’t want them.

I do too. To be clear, I did NOT mean that we could go without it today. What I meant was that if we didn’t have it to start with, things would’ve likely still developed albeit much more slowly.

I’ll also preface this by saying I definitely slightly misread everything before and so my reply was kinda crappy

It wouldn’t necessarily collapse (it wasn’t exactly suffering before FOSS stuff “hit the shelves”, so to speak) but the gatekeeping that comes with it would certainly cause a tremendous amount of stagnation