I’ve become convinced that Matrix should have been built on top of XMPP. They went out of their way to create a protocol from scratch when we already had XMPP available and well developed. This turned out to be much more difficult than they anticipated, and they’ve had to make drastic changes to the api, spec, and server over the years. Matrix will never be a stable, finished product because they aren’t even sure what that looks like. They can’t even stick with a name for crying out loud. Dendrite? Synapse? Pick one and put all your effort behind it.
The sifting sand base that Matrix is built on top of becomes really glatibg when you look at the clients and servers available for Matrix. Not one single third party app that I’m aware of implements every single feature offered by Element (the app). No other server is fully compliant with the API. And, Matrix is YET ANOTHER PROTOCOL that chat apps have to integrate with.
None of that is to mention that the VC for Matrix is about to run out. Either Riot/Matrix/Element/Whatever is going to sellout and enshittify, or they’re going to stop existing and the entire protocol will be dead in the water. XMPP doesn’t have this problem.
They should have built a beautiful XMPP app, slapped signal encryption on top, and called it a day.