> Let's quickly address the present state of the ecosystem. Matrix rates well in most of these respects, much better than others. However, their software is way too complicated. They are federated, but the software is far from reliable or robust, so the ecosystem tends to be centralized because Matrix.org are the only ones who have the knowledge and bandwidth to keep it up and running. The performance sucks, client and server both, and their UX for E2EE is confusing and difficult to use.<p>This sounds more an argument for improving work on some of the alternate Matrix server implementations that, on paper, should suck a bit less (Dendrite showing promise, though getting the C++ version up to speed wouldn't be a bad idea either).<p>A lot of the problems with the Matrix ecosystem are fundamentally problems with the reference homeserver implementation, Synapse, being written in Python - and being, as a result, a rather bloated, slow, hungry memory pig. No arguments from me, I run a Matrix homeserver and the thing is a pig (about 2 decades ago, I ran an IRC network on a pair of Mac SE/30s - yes, obsolete at the time, and worked just fine for the task). You can get away with a smaller homeserver host as long as nobody joins any gigantic rooms.<p>Federation is a minor pain to set up and keep working, but unless I've missed something, the biggest hassle is the lack of monitoring infrastructure (optional, of course). I can manually run the Federation Checker to see if my server is weird, but without a way to say "Hey, I'm the admin for this server, let me know if it goes wrong," it's up to admins to notice federation is broken. I have a number of users on my server, but apparently nobody actually talks outside my server, because my federation was broken for... longer than it ought to have been, and nobody noticed.<p>On the other hand, being able to stand up isolated servers for a family or something is quite nice. The downside, right now, is that Element (the flagship Matrix client) doesn't support multiple users in the way that Hangouts (and perhaps other clients, not as familiar with them) does. That would be a huge improvement.<p>I agree with the list of items presented, and at this point think Matrix is "some tweaks and improvements" away from being there, as opposed to "totally unable to get there." It <i>is</i> a somewhat heavy system to use for text based chat, but it also works, works fairly well, and isn't utterly impossible to set up on the sysadmin side. Once someone is running a homeserver, getting users added is quite straightforward for the users, and Element is just as well behaved as a client as Hangouts or Signal, in my experience (well, better than Signal, it's not phone number first).