> You're the CEO of actor, right?
Yes, my pleasure.
> How do you position yourself against Telegram (according to the first Actor post that's where you're coming from) or other solutions?
We are replacement for Jabber with powerful productivity-related apps on desktop and people-friendly mobile apps. We are completely open, high performant out of the box. Unlike Jabber we are not non-profit that helps us keep development of the platform, but our sources are completely open.
> How are you planning to make money/to stay in business?
Actor is already profitable company. A lot of people want to make their own messaging solution, integrate to existing systems, make some customizations and even solve email overflow or other communication issues in the big organizations (with 100k+ of employees). Server can handle millions of users just like Telegram and people need it if they have resources to launch niche messaging app in some country, but don't want to spend years to build it (like we was). That's how we make money.
We are lack of resources for landing page development - all forces used at our desktop/web app. If someone want to join us just email me) at steve (at) actor.im :) We are hope that we will clean up all sych stuff on the next stage of our product.
> How easy is it to build/run a server?
Almost just like apt-get install actor with required configuration: https://github.com/actorapp/actor-bootstrap/tree/master/docs...
> Everytime federated messages come up, someone will mention matrix
Yes. We talked to them. Actually we use matrix ideas in our s2s protocol drafts: https://github.com/actorapp/actor-platform/blob/master/docs/...
One problem with matrix is that it is not considered as production ready, but actor is and already serve 100k's users on foreign instances and it is production ready. We will work on our draft and will then merge our ideas with matrix one.