Four walled-off app containers, each holding its own green presence dot, with the links between them severed

Presence Was Supposed to Be Infrastructure

XMPP didn’t lose. The web turned presence into a product and rented it back to us one app at a time. Matrix isn’t the successor — it’s a different bet, and the thing it turned off is the P.

August 31, 2026 · 8 min · Vladimir Cvetić