Persona

foss

• altruist, cares about others, the wider society and our future
• believes in local sustainability, lives in a DFSG island (free libre software)
• writes and reviews code for her community, shares changes upstream
• can accept compromises in usability, willing to learn
• flexible in circle of trust if it serves independence
• prefers well tested real world solutions for real world problems
• understands real world security bottlenecks: has a bird's eye view of all the various kinds of defenses and attempts to apply protections throughout the system at a similar baseline level in all areas
• the monetization methods should ensure independence in sustainability, but not alienate or sell out users
• some providers may be boycotted for philosophical reasons, to serve the greater good
• Aim towards long term stability, try to converge to a set of solutions over the years instead of hopping from one to another.
• Prefer models and providers that have a clear sustainable future (and past)
• Take the ethical moral high ground in any aspect, for example when it comes to environmental protection (avoid proof of work).

tinfoil

• selfish, only cares about herself
• public enemy, national threat actor, criminal
• wouldn't trust a family member or a friend to operate a service to share with her
• trust nobody (except developers and build system operators and their significant others, their own circles of social networking influence, the hardware manufacturer, their infrastructure provider)
• attempts to shield against all previously published theoretical threats, regardless of a cohesive threat model (which every app, program, device, etc, must have)
• Actors with a bad reputation should be boycotted, but otherwise it doesn't matter who runs the show in the given year - if one opportunity closes down, just try to find another one.

layperson

• expect a solution to be as easy to use as the market leaders and mimic its interface paradigms
• hopefully not many compromises should be made, because each disappointment will result in incremental churn
• would like to keep in touch with as many friends as possible, preferably on 1 or 2 platforms
• can jump into something new if it brings something new to the table
• can usually understand high level metrics such as effect on battery time, overheating, and abnormal amount of data transfer costs
• quality of life features are paramount: VoIP, video chat, group meetings

crowd

• as in "crowdsourcing" or "citizen science"
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science
• strive for sustainability (via FOSS) even after every major player went bankrupt
• separate resources (donating hardware and bandwidth resources) from authority (abuse control, moderation, peer discovery)
• scale through friend to friend networking and/or through best effort reputation, web of trust and elected supernode promotion
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend_to_friend
• It's not a problem if an implementation is of low quality or lacks features, because that gives more opportunity for people to work on
• The protocol and architecture should support implementing most trendy features or lightweight alternatives (e.g., slideshows and push-to-talk)
• #wan_crowdsourcing

Private

• need to communicate sensitive information in the way you can whisper to someone or meet them in person
• willing to take some immediate compromises to features for a misuse resistant, user-friendly private messaging experience
• don't want to stand out as using something different to what everyone else uses as that draws scrutiny and attention

Collaborative

• need various complicated features to enhance communication, expression, productivity etc.
• may be one or more members of the collaborative with decent technical skills to maintain the messaging solution for the rest
• information is owned by the members of the collaborative and in such small trusted organisations or groups of people, it is natural to sometimes delegate a bit of oversight to a few members

Public

• just need an ethical and sustainable way to connect with strangers and other netizens over all aspects of life
• one of those things to connect with people over will be entertainment, so multimedia capabilities and extended feature set are probably required